Barry's Blog

Last week, in the second of an installment, we considered a few of the meditations of Blaise Pascal, his "pensees," as they are laid out in The Trinity Forum Reading booklet, "The Wager and Other Selections from the Pensees," with commentary provided by Peter Kreeft. In these unique writings, Pascal, who labored over them slowly and painfully the last four years of his life, beginning in 1657, he has crafted an argument for the "examined life," that is compelling to even the entrepreneurs and risk-takers of our own day.

A central focus of Pascal's on the human condition is the matter of human 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..."  

Listen carefully to three of his pensees dealing with vanity:

"Here is this man, born to know the universe, to judge everything, to rule a whole state, wholly concerned with catching a hare!" (#522)

Kreeft's comments are spot on: "Notice the comic and tragic contrast between our nature and our lives, between what we are born to do ("born to know the universe, to judge everything") and what we do ("wholly concerned with catching a hare"), between our greatness and our pettiness." (By the way, I wonder if this may relate to the Apostle Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 6, where he chides the Corinthian believers who take their petty offenses before pagan courts, seeing that "the saints will judge the world"). 

"Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it; in other words, we would never travel by sea if it meant never talking about it, and for the sheer pleasure of seeing things we could never hope to describe to others." (#77)

Here is an interesting diagnostic for us to consider. Can you imagine going on a vacation to a wonderful foreign destination that you have dreamed and planned on going for a long time, but you were not allowed to talk about it with your friends? To show them your pictures? Your movies? Pascal is drilling down to ask us, and almost 400 years ago, why we want to take holiday vacations! What drives us? Is it not often in some sense so we can attach significance to ourselves by where we have traveled? Kreeft comments succinctly: "Thus we take vacations only to take pictures. We use reality as a means to the end of producing appearances of it." Which segues nicely to another interesting pensee....

"We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try to make an impression." (#806)  

This seems to be the crux of the matter for many of us, because we desire to "make an impression." Deep down, we may feel an emptiness and hollowness, so we attach the seemingly important things of this world to ourselves as symbols of status, seeking the favor and approval of others. Kreeft makes some provocative observations about this pensee, and I am not sure he is correct, but it is worth reflecting on. He writes:

"Most of all, deep down, we fear damnation. Damnation is the loss of your soul, true self, image of God, real 'I.' In this life, perhaps the closest we come to that is emptiness, hollowness, 'nobody there,' 'nobody home.' We fear we are really insubstantial ghosts, deep down...To prove we are real, we make splashes in others' pools. Especially by the two things no ghost can do: sex and violence. This is the deep, unconscious source of our obsession with sex and violence: a secular society has no other way of overcoming the fear of damnation. (Except for diversion and indifference, the two other modern pseudo-solutions,)..."

I wonder if he is on to something....your thoughts?