Pensées

“I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 77 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gamePascal on Descartes, and he does not soften it. The whole system was built so that God could be dispensed with — kept on only long enough to flick the world into motion, and unemployed ever after.

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 206 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gamePascal writes the terror down instead of answering it. The apologist most famous for a bet is also the one who admits the sky is frightening.

“The last proceeding of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is but feeble if it does not see so far as to know this. But if natural things are beyond it, what will be said of supernatural?”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 267 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameNot the rejection of reason and not the worship of it. Reason’s finest act is to map its own edge — and, having found an edge in ordinary things, to expect one in the things of God.

“Thought constitutes the greatness of man.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 346 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameSix words, and they carry the positive half of the argument. Whatever else we are, we are the thing that knows it.

“They think they are truly seeking quiet, and they are only seeking excitement.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 139 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gamePeople say they want rest and then arrange their lives so they never get any. Pascal takes them at their actions rather than their word.

“Custom is our nature. He who is accustomed to the faith believes in it, can no longer fear hell, and believes in nothing else.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 89 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameA warning aimed at his own side. Most of what a man calls conviction he got by habit, and habit will hold a false thing exactly as firmly.

“What is a man in the Infinite?”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 72 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameAsked, not answered. Pascal leaves the question standing on purpose, because a reader who feels it will go looking.

“So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 172 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameThe present is the one thing nobody spends. We arrange to be happy later, permanently, and the arranging eats the life.

“Cleopatra’s nose: had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 162 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameHistory turns on things too small to plan for. Pascal uses it against every account of the past that arrives at itself by necessity.

“For in him we live, and move, and have our being. As some of your own poets have said.”

Acts 17:28 (WEB) — Paul at the Areopagus, quoting the Athenians’ own poets back to them.

In the gamePick the part of the opponent’s case that is true and affirm it. That point can no longer be used against you, and the opponent’s Defend falls sharply. It deals no damage. Affirm something false and you have only agreed with an error.

“It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 72 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameA figure old before he used it, turned on nature itself: whatever you measure from, you are not at the middle of it.

“The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion…”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 171 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain). Cut before the following clause, which the public-domain scan garbles.public domain

In the gameWhy nobody sits still. We are not distracted because life is dull; we distract ourselves because sitting still means noticing what we are.

“They have another secret instinct, a remnant of the greatness of our original nature, which teaches them that happiness in reality consists only in rest, and not in stir.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 139 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameThe other half of the diagnosis, and the hopeful half. The restlessness is not only a fault — it is a memory of having been made for something.

“I would have far more fear of being mistaken, and of finding that the Christian religion was true, than of not being mistaken in believing it true.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 241 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameTurns the risk around. The unbeliever is not the one standing on safe ground while the believer gambles — both are exposed, and only one of the two mistakes is recoverable.

“It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought… By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 348 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain). (trimmed quote)public domain

In the gameSize is the wrong measure and Pascal refuses it. The universe swallows him without knowing it did; he comprehends the universe. May steady the reader’s own Defend.

“There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 233 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameSets the table before the bet. Neither side can reach the other by proof — and Pascal says so first, out loud, rather than pretending to a certainty he has not got.

“Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 358 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameBoth halves at once, which is the whole method. Any account of us that keeps only one half has to explain away the other.

“There are three orders of things: the flesh, the spirit, and the will. The carnal are the rich and kings; they have the body as their object. Inquirers and scientists; they have the mind as their object. The wise; they have righteousness as their object.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 460 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameBodies, minds and charity are three different kinds of greatness, and no amount of the lower ever adds up to the higher. A king is not close to being a philosopher; a philosopher is not close to being a saint.

“It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 278 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameThe definition that follows from it. Faith is not a conclusion you are argued into; it is God known by the faculty that knows persons.

“You made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it reposes in You.”

Augustine, Confessions 1.1 (trans. Pusey, 1838, public domain, lightly modernized).public domain

In the gameExperience, directed toward God at last — what the Coach felt in his gut, Augustine prayed onto papyrus.

“…is not a happy life what all will, and no one altogether wills it not?… And this is the happy life, to rejoice to Thee, of Thee, for Thee; this is it, and there is no other.”

Augustine, Confessions 10.20–23 (trans. E. B. Pusey, 1838, public domain).public domain

“the desire of the true good is naturally implanted in the minds of men; only error leads them aside out of the way in pursuit of the false.”

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy III.2 (trans. H. R. James, 1897, public domain).public domain

In the gameNobody has to be taught to want to be happy, and nothing on offer finishes the wanting. Augustine and Boethius, a century apart, both take the permanent hunger as evidence of where the food is.

“All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 139 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gamePascal traces every restlessness he can find back to a single inability, and states it as a diagnosis rather than a scolding.

“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 277 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameNot a licence for feeling over thinking. Pascal the mathematician is saying there is a second faculty that knows things, and that first principles arrive by it.

“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 347 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain).public domain

In the gameThe most quoted sentence Pascal wrote, and the one that holds his whole anthropology: we are crushable, and we are the only thing in the wreck that understands it.

“…you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked… If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”

Pascal, Pensées, Br. 233 (trans. W. F. Trotter, public domain). (trimmed quote)public domain

In the gameThe famous one, and it is not an argument that God exists. It is an argument that not choosing is already a choice, and that the stakes are not symmetrical.