Barry's Blog

In the last installment examining some of Pascal's pensees from The Trinity Forum's booklet, "Blaise Pascal: The Wager and Other Selections from the Pensees," with commentary by Peter Kreeft, we considered two pseudo-solutions to the human dilemma. They are the pseudo-solutions of diversions and indifference. We turn now to the one remaining bit of innate sanity, to use Kreeft's phrase, that abides despite our insane and decadent culture: the knowledge that we will all die. As Dr. Johnson once declared, "I know know thought that so wonderfully clarifies the mind as the thought that I shall hang tomorrow morning."

Listen to Pascal: "There are only three sorts of people: those who have found God and serve Him; those who are busy seeking him and have not found him; those who live without either seeking or finding him. The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy, those in the middle are unhappy and yet reasonable." (#160)

Kreeft rightly reminds us that there is no fourth class. The first group are believers, who are "reasonable" or wise because they seek, and happy because they have found. Group two consists of the unhappy atheists and agnostics, who are "reasonable" since they seek, yet unhappy because they have not yet found. The last group is comprised of the contented atheists or agnostics, who are "unreasonable," Kreeft calls them "spiritually insane," because they do not even seek the truth, and who are unhappy (forever) because they do not, nor desire, to ever find.

The Great Divide, then, is not between theists and atheists, or between those who are happy and those who are not happy, but between those who are seekers and non-seekers of the Truth (for God is Truth, John 14:6). For you see, it is with the heart, and not the head, that determines eternal destiny. This is reminiscent of C. S. Lewis' great theological fantasy, The Great Divorce, in which a busload of people in Hell are allowed access to the Great City, Heaven, and can stay as long as they wish, but all but one decides to return to the drab, gray city below. As C. S. Lewis quotes his guide in the book, George MacDonald, "The byword of Hell is 'I am my own.' All who are in Hell choose it."

"Death turns your habitual perspective upside down --that is, really right side up. Tiny things, like economics and technology and politics, no longer loom large, and enormous things, like religion and morality, no longer seem thin and far away. In a word, death removes 'vanity.' One of life's biggest problems, death, solves an even bigger one, vanity..." -Peter Kreeft

So which group are we in?