PASCAL’S GOT MY BACK: From the Pensees: “The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is called nature we call wretchedness in man; by which we recognize that, his nature now being like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his. For who is unhappy at not being a king except a deposed king? Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no one ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes; but anyone would be inconsolable at having none.”

From me: “But while an experience of beauty in inanimate objects is a radical encounter with the present tense, an experience of beauty in human beings or human acts is more often a radical encounter with the subjunctive tense–the might-have-been. Human beauty is always ‘almost,’ always more poignant and more sublime because of the great disjunction between what we are and what we feel we should have been. …Human beauty, to my mind, is a clue that man is not inherently good (since our beauty always comes with this downward pull toward decay; and since we are even able to pervert beauty and submerge it in lust or hate), nor inherently bad (since it would not be nearly as painful–as sublime–to see a bad thing just being its ordinary bad self), but fallen–a good creature that cannot, in this life, be what he was supposed to be.”

I was reminded of the Pascal passage by this good article on original sin.