"READING BETWEEN THE LINES" "ON PASCAL" "Brice Parain, in your book De fil en aiguille, you state that your earliest philosophical questionings were prompted by Pascal." "However, back then, it was in the context of mathematics." "I wouldn't phrase it exactly the same way today." "Anyway, I was in tenth grade." "If you read pascal at that age, it really shakes you up, and you should read him, because you need shaking up." "At that age you're starting to be aware of death, and as a result, you realize things about life and that these things bear reflection." "I don't think Father Dubarle would agree." "Oh, I don't know, but it's funny to see we discovered pascal at almost the same age." "I was in eleventh grade." "It wasn't through mathematics - that came later for me - but by reading his Pensées." "It marked me deeply too, but in a curious way," "I was also annoyed by that kind of writing." "I remember tearing him to pieces before my school chaplain and saying I couldn't stand that kind of belief." "I was totally opposed to pascal's vision of existence." "Forgive me, but were you perhaps afraid of the harshness with which pascal judges life, and his mistrust, which is a terrifying thing?" "Do you remember?" " Yes, very well." "No, I wasn't at all afraid." "I'd already been confronted with death at a young age, though not personally." "No, it was more a complete refusal of a judgment that seemed incorrect to me." "But it didn't cause me anxiety." "Perhaps it was about lying." "pascal sharply accuses mankind of being hypocritical." "Mankind's greatest sin is Iying." "It's the original sin." "Lying is the basic, cardinal sin of mankind." "Yes, it is." "As Christians say, "the father of lies."" "It's awful, but all the same, it seems to me there's an element that's difficult to grasp, but the older I got, the more I thought about it." "It comes down to an undue emphasis." "In my opinion, pascal focuses on one aspect of the bible, the old Testament as seen by a Christian, but something occurred later that isn't represented in these writings." "Yes, of course." "There's no redemption, no right to life in pascal's viewpoint." "When reading pascal, you might wonder if you have the right to live." "Very true." "nevertheless, pascal never questions our right to think." "Never." "Nor our right to live, really." " No, not really." "But I wouldn't want a life like the one pascal accords us." "That's true." "It's heavy." "Not only heavy." "It seems incorrect to me." "Why incorrect?" "Is it because " "Yes, perhaps because in your heart you believe in redemption, that mankind isn't so bad, so totally at the mercy of hardship and chance." "To save time, I'II explain that, before pascal, a certain phrase obsessed me, even as a kid, and has stayed with me all my Iife." "St. John wrote, " For we believed in love," and that always prevails." "That said, I'd Iike to start over." "We'II come back to that later." "We need to talk about pascal the thinker, the great mathematician, the young man of 27 or 30 in 1650 who suddenly discovered equilibrium, not as it's understood today." "That came later, with differential and integral calculus, and the work of Newton and Leibniz" "45 years later." "But the man who discovered the foundation, the 1 7th-century man who knew he was bidding farewell to the middle Ages and the Renaissance to enter a new and infinite world, one that pascal commanded, and it foreshadows the man" "who will later find his place in relation to the planet, to the expanding universe with its spirals of cosmic dust, and ponder his role, what he's here to do, and what he must attempt as a man." "pascal could have been, and was, a great scientist." "It's said he knew differential calculus inside out, and he threw it all to the dogs and turned to religion." "There's the crux of the matter." "I'm not sure he really threw it to the dogs." "Of course, there was still his work with roulette." "One can learn a Iot from the history of science." "Sure, VaIéry said pascal wasted his time sewing notes into his pocket one November night when he could have given France the glory of infinitesimal calculus." "But is that really true?" " certainly not." "My vision of pascal could be summed up in pascal's own words on the subject of Archimedes:" "" Oh, how he shattered the spirit world."" "Going beyond Cartesian and Copernican foundations, which didn't yet include the mechanics and physics of infinitesimal calculus, which wouldn't come along for another 40 years, it seems to me pascal suddenly sent up this amazing rocket" "without which I don't think infinitesimal calculus could later have come into being." "As Leibniz said when he read pascal's text on the characteristic triangle, he was surprised to see, as if leaning over the author's shoulder, knowledge the author himself was unaware of." "I think pascal's greatness, Iike that of any true scientific genius, is to encode in his works knowledge that the next generation, as if leaning over his shoulder, will decode." "Listening to you, I was thinking " "How can I say this?" "You couldn't have been all that shocked by pascal because in a way you obeyed him." "The fact you chose a religious path shows that, in a way, you don't need pascal." "Because what does pascal tell us?" ""Without God, man is unhappy." "believe in God."" "His real struggle lay in trying to prove this to us, but he doesn't need to prove it to you." "That seems to be the difference between us." "What I'm about to say may surprise you, but my struggle with faith occurred after I entered religious life, not before." "Before, I was quite comfortable." "I had a fine Christian upbringing, and then the strange idea of entering religious life came over me quite suddenly." "I thought I had everything all worked out." "But I was already in revolt against pascal at that point." "I found him overdramatic, too angst-ridden, waxing rhetorical on issues I felt were seIf-evident." "Later, of course, I began to see what lay behind that rhetoric:" "the abyss, the desert, the dried-up wells on long voyages across arid lands." "Those things certainly happened to me, but I didn't experience them in the same way." "And sometimes pascal shocked me with his iII-digested bitterness." "Perhaps it's unfair to say that." "Later I understood why he was so harsh in his Provincial Letters, but even today, I think he was too hard at times." "In certain cases, I don't think it's the true severity of the gospel that's behind his formulations." "Sometimes he gets carried away by his own style." "I can't say I'm a believer." "I can't pretend to have the faith I might have if I'd entered a religious order." "Yet as a result, that makes me feel closer to him because I have the same anxiety, the same worries." "I wonder, "What's reason's role in all this?" "I wonder if we shouldn't examine pascal the mathematician, who discovered and understood, perhaps better than we realized for two centuries, how to calculate probability." "pascal didn't call it that." "To him it was "the problem of points."" "To this kind of mathematics he brought both reason and what usually falls outside the bounds of reason." "This is at the heart of the wonder of PascaIian rationality, if rationality is the appropriate term, and of pascal himself, certainly." "When he says "to work for an uncertainty,"" "we sense that at the very highest levels of the spirit, his concrete expression of it was to follow the Christian faith, but regardless of its expression, everyone has a moment of truth when we " act and work reasonably for an uncertainty,"" "though we're unsure of success." "Perhaps this is where pascal's true greatness lies." "That's not what bothers me." "What sometimes worries me is that from these great heights, this eternal truth for mankind that has taken even deeper hold in the soul of modern man, he faIIs back on a certain rhetoric." "There's certainly an eloquence to pascal's writing." "His phrases are long and weII-crafted, with many examples." "But the many times he refers to the use of literary devices, what he calls "false windows,"" "he's talking about himself, because he's overflowing with enthusiasm." "He wants to prove his point." "But there's something alarming in his work, and that's his relationship with reality." "To him, reality is insurmountable, impossible to prove." "It's the devil." "This is beyond the reach of mathematics." "In 1661 or '62, when he said he'd never have anything more to do with geometry, that was astounding for a man like pascal." " Of course." " And he really meant it." "He wanted to reach something deeper and more real than mathematics." "I don't doubt it." "It's just that in pascal's work, I witness an extraordinary struggle that doesn't exist anywhere else in French literature, except perhaps in a few contemporary writers." "It's a struggle between words and numbers, which pascal uses with great skill on occasion, and that which is beyond all words and numbers, which I'd call " grace."" "suddenly, the rhythm breaks and something very humble appears, yet it's greater than what had until then appeared to be greatest." "In some of his writing this " something else" slips through." " You won't find it anywhere else." " Very true." "What you will find are men who more fully accepted the poverty of language and the imperfection of the human heart that seeks to express itself." "And it's easier to forgive them than pascal, who struggled and sought to overcome instead." "It's idiotic, of course, to strive to achieve what's impossible." "It's crazy and arrogant." "But what else can a human being do?" " True." "Despite everything, he was human." "There's something else as well." "You can see I'm full of objections and reservations, always playing the devil's advocate." "It bothers me to see style become a weapon, even when used against men guilty of great wrongs, a weapon used to run a man through and fix him in literature for all time." "Do you have the right to use the pen to run a man through, even if he's guilty, even if your style is admirable?" "I think we must." "It's something that touches me deeply in pascal's work:" "this kind of violence that oversteps the bounds of convention." "Keep in mind two things:" "I don't remember where exactly, but he said," ""We don't have the right to love." He made that statement." "We only have the right to love God because humans are fragile and mediocre, so rationally, we don't have the right to love." "That's quite extreme, because it forbids life." "Another position of the same order is in the letter to mademoiselle de Rouanaise, which I Iooked at last night." "We must even accept hypocrisy and blindness." "We mustn't be shocked when our opponents are willfully blind, because Jesus himself was subjected to that." "Even a statement of proof can't expect to be believed." "He heads straight for the worst, the most devilish part in man." "He sees it and accepts it." "This is quite something, because he wants to remake mankind, not starting from "the honest man,"" "as for a while he thought he might, but from the worst among men." "That's his task, and it's a challenging one." "But can we do anything less?" "I accept this second stance of pascal's completely." "We must make of man what he should be, but starting from what he is." "But this makes me oppose the first statement with even greater force." "No, we all have the right to love, without exception." "And I don't just mean to love God alone or love others in God's name." "I think the path to God's love starts by loving poor humanity, and God will lead us from there." "It's not only a right." "It's a pressing obligation." "And this may be where the conflicting elements come together." "I think " pressing obligation"" "says it much better than "the right to love."" "An obligation is more terrifying than a right." "We don't have the right to love, and yet we must." "That's what I feel when reading pascal." "It's much more profound than our normal way of loving, which we take to be something simple and natural and safe." "That's wrong." "Love is a challenge." "Love is a challenge in the face of death, in the face of our inability to communicate, in the face of hypocrisy and conflict." "The power of contradiction is very strong here." "If what he's asserting here isn't simply silly and vain, which it wouId be if it were simply of the devil, then it surpasses everything, even geometry." "AII the same," "I think the young man who seeks his beloved has the right to love." "The rest comes later." "secondly, when we've experienced what you said, we reach a point beyond the pressing obligation to love where we reach the right to love and the peace of love." "Perhaps pascal didn't live long enough to reach the age where the right to love replaces the obligation to love, and where the peace of love becomes the greatest of rights, the most marvelous obligation, and the greatest part of man." "Perhaps that's why I always feel that pascal is immense yet incomplete in his immensity." "I praise his immensity and am thankful for his incompleteness, because if a man were complete, perhaps that would be too much." "We are all incomplete, completed only by Jesus Christ." "Even though I've lived longer than pascal ever did," "I haven't found the peace you speak of." "I still don't know whether we have the right to love." "I wonder if pascal's authenticity hasn't been transformed by the romanticization of its tragic aspect." "We need to put the man back into context among the men of that incredible period of the 1650s who know that a page in European history has been turned, and that a new one is to begin, though it's unclear where it will lead." "It didn't only lead to the French revolution." "It led us to today, where we face a whole new world." "We need to go back to pascal's rationality, which I feel has been largely abandoned along the way." "Then why don't we start "working for an uncertainty"?" "Very well."