2023-06-16 20:53:49
Besides Blaise Pascal’s birthday, what made you want to write this book?
John of Saint-Cheron: I feel a great friendship for Pascal, whose work is inexhaustible. I wanted to celebrate his 400 with dignitye anniversary. So I wrote an introduction to his life and his thought, with a commentary on 15 major texts, because even if he is very famous, he is little and misunderstood.
Everyone quotes him: “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know”, “All the misfortune of men comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to remain at rest in a room”… But these quotes are taken out of context and everyone interprets them as they see fit… I wanted to restore the coherence of his thought. For me, it is timeless, still relevant, today as it was a hundred or two hundred years ago, because it speaks of man with unparalleled realism.
What is the heart of his thought?
J. de S.-C. : It’s difficult to answer briefly: Pascal is all at once a philosopher, a mathematician, an inventor, a theologian… who put his great intelligence at the service of defending Christianity and explaining the faith. Faith is inseparable from his reflection, it is at the heart of his search for truth. All his Thoughts are a striking illustration of this. It starts from the observation that we all seek truth and happiness, but that we fail to achieve it on our own.
What truth is he talking about?
J. de S.-C. : Pascal is not a relativist. It speaks of the truth which is one and unique, even if we are unable to express it unequivocally because it escapes us. Witness the failure of philosophy, which does not offer a unified discourse: each philosophical point of view can be contradicted.
Pascal will therefore seek to understand the inability of philosophers to agree among themselves (is man great or miserable?). And what he discovers, in a very clear and even very radical way, is that apart from Christ, man is incapable of attaining the truth.
Why does he associate truth with happiness and charity, as you write in your book?
J. de S.-C. : To know God is to know truth and happiness. Happiness, eternal life and the knowledge of God are one and the same thing. Charity is love, it is God himself. “The truth outside of charity is not God”, Pascal said. There is no divine truth outside of love, which is strictly synonymous with the word charity. Charity is divine love, the greatest of all, it is the love of one who gives his life for others, as Christ did.
Pascal was a thinker who had a very high idea of human reason. Can we say that he was able to reconcile faith and reason?
J. de S.-C. : There is no opposition or contradiction, with him, between faith and reason. To hold as certain, because of faith, things contrary to scientific truth would be ridiculous in his eyes. One of Pascal’s great exercises will be to show not only that faith is reasonable, but that it takes us further than reason alone: it enables us to have the eyes of faith, and to see the truth in the order of the heart, which is the order of charity. But this is a gift from God.
But man can incline his will by asking to receive it. The discourse of the Christian faith speaks of man in a realistic way, with the doctrine of original sin, in particular. And only faith can lead man where his reason alone cannot lead him: to happiness. The smartest man in the world, if he doesn’t love, can’t be happy.
Would you say he’s a mystic?
J. de S.-C. : Pascal’s adventure is primarily intellectual. Some have sought to make the “night of fire”, his conversion on the night of November 23, 1654, a radical turning point in his life, during which he renounced the use of reason to turn to piety and sensitive relationship with God. In reality, he continued his research in mathematics (even if he gradually reduced and abandoned it at the very end of his life), and never stopped developing concepts. It would be very simplistic to imply that Pascal’s faith is only a mystical feeling that would have gripped him. Faith and reason are not contradictory, on the contrary.
The event of his conversion is the culmination of an intellectual adventure, which leads him to the voluntary choice of“incline one’s heart” in the sense of knowing God. This inclination is the gesture of human freedom which receives the grace of God. If he had a mystical life, it was in the noblest sense of the term: a personal knowledge of God, which is inseparable from his intellectual adventure.
Can the Jansenist he was still speak to our contemporaries?
J. de S.-C. : In my opinion, at the end of his life, he was no longer a Jansenist. He supported his friends at Port-Royal because he had a sense of honor and because he firmly opposed the Jesuits, whose casuistry he found hypocritical and lax, even theologically dangerous. Moreover, the Jesuits were on the side of the absolutist royal power, which Pascal and the people of Port-Royal contested.
For me, he speaks to our contemporaries because he does not believe that we can convince atheists by presenting them with proofs, scientific or metaphysical, of the existence of God. He knows that faith is given by grace. He is able to speak to the errors of the world without God, to the errors of man locked up in his pride, in his laziness, in his passions…
He shows that faith is infinitely more reasonable than the refusal to believe of those who, very often, are afraid that religion is true: this would prevent them from continuing to lead their selfish existence. Moreover, his prodigious mathematical and scientific intelligence testifies that faith never contradicts reason but, on the contrary, that it enlightens it. And then he is a writer whose language is modern, lively and funny, delicious to read today.
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