One of the concepts Pascal is best known for is his Wager, a longer fragment in Pensées (f. 418). Here Pascal brings his formidable mathematical mind, operating halfway between the gambling table and the altar, to the issue of faith, and plays with probability theory in the soul. It is such a rich and complex argument that I can’t even begin to deal with all its components. (Nor do I understand them all!) On the surface, it’s simple enough: “Let... Read more
If I were less ordinary, reading Flannery O’Connor would be more fun. As it is, I inhabit the commonplace, and she lives in a different dimension, a place, as one critic put it, of living gargoyles. This makes reading her fiction a stressful and shocking experience. I imagine that, if she knew this, it would please her very much. Flannery O’Connor, one of America’s unique literary voices in the twentieth century, did not aim to soothe, or entertain, or please,... Read more
In our last Pascalian conversation, I left you with fire. And if you’ve had an experience like Pascal’s, perhaps you feel that all this blather about science and reason and blah, blah, blah is highly irritating. Fire is warm and bright and compelling. Science and reason is cold and comfortless. Can we really come to faith without fire? Are we left with only reason or experience as avenues of faith? When I was in youth group, the kids with the... Read more
I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom these days anyway, since it has been nearly thirty-three years to the day since I last saw her. And then I read this article: “Not Your Mother’s Morals”: A Review. And let me say up front, this post is no reflection on Jonathan Fitzgerald, his mother’s morals, his position on his mother’s morals, or his thoughts about your mother’s morals. This is not a comment about his book, which I have not... Read more
Any Star Trek fans out there? The Original Series? Do you remember the episode called “The City on the Edge of Forever”? No? Okay, here’s a short story, a blend of science fiction, mid-sixties silliness, and historical play: Dr. McCoy has passed through the Guardian of Forever, a portal into time and space that could take you anywhere. Captain Kirk and Spock need to rescue him and undo the historical damage he has done—something McCoy did has altered the past... Read more
When Pascal died, those who prepared his body for burial found sewn into the lining of his jacket a small piece of paper. Apparently he carried it with him everywhere he went, transferring it from jacket to jacket as they were changed, through the last eight years of his life. Clearly, this paper, called the Memorial, records something that Pascal believed to be pivotal to his view of the world, worth remembering every morning when he dressed, directive of all... Read more
Earlier we took a quick look at a scientific experiment conducted by Pascal in 1646, and we considered the ways that that experiment led him to two general “laws” of knowledge. If we want to know what is truly true, we will not rely only on what we’ve been told, and we will not rely on what seems most logical. We will use our reason, and we will discover the truth for ourselves. In our world, faith is treated as... Read more
In the Anglican Ash Wednesday ritual, we pray for the grace of true repentance. Repentance means to turn around, which obviously means you’re going to be looking in a different direction, seeing something that was “behind your back” before. And what do we see when we repent? “Jesus Christ is the object of all things, the centre towards which all things tend. Whoever knows him knows the reason for everything” (f. 449). When we repent, we see Jesus Christ. The... Read more
Last week we explored the Jansenist effort to reconstruct Christian community as the fellowship of the really-serious-no-compromise-do-it-right-all-the-time-damn-it. While part of me wishes I could actually be the ascetic that this demands, the other part of me is sitting here eating potato chips. I suspect Pascal had fewer bouts of self-indulgence, but something kept him from going all the way with the Jansenist agenda. That something may have been his passion for engaging the cutting edge ideas, discoveries, and concepts of... Read more
In pursuing Pascal, it is not long before we come face-to-face with a conundrum. It’s the sticky wicket that challenged Pascal, and while we won’t be able to resolve it, we can at least look at it. Last week we talked about the violent division in French society between Catholics and Protestants. Religious conflict wasn’t exclusively French of course; the Germans had their Schmalkaldic War between Lutherans and Catholics; the English had their years of seesaw oppression—from Catholic to Protestant... Read more
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