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Pensées

Blaise Pascal/1670 / Early Modern

DiversionFaith And DoubtHuman Misery And GreatnessThe Wager

DiversionFaith And DoubtHuman Misery And GreatnessThe Wager

Apologetics in the Christian philosophy tradition, oriented around diversion and faith and doubt.

Pascal's Pensees is a posthumously assembled collection of notes for an unfinished Christian apology, written after his religious turn at Port-Royal. Its fragments move between psychological observation, theological argument, and spiritual diagnosis, making the work one of the great texts on belief, skepticism, diversion, and the human condition.

448 excerpts/15 sections

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Chapters

The structural skeleton of the work

Section 1

Introduction

5 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Mysticism2 excerpts Artistic Creation1 excerpt Inspiration1 excerpt Moral Behavior1 excerpt Pelagianism1 excerpt

The Return to Reason

No masterpiece can be produced whole by such means; but neither does even the higher form of religious inspiration suffice for the religious life; even the most exalted mystic must return to the world, and use his reason to employ the results of his experience in daily life. You may call it communion with the Divine, or you may call it a temporary crystallisation of the mind. Until science can teach us to reproduce such phenomena at will, science cannot claim to have explained them; and they can be judged only by their fruits.

Section I

Section I THOUGHTS ON MAN AND ON STYLE

18 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Human Nature3 excerpts Perception3 excerpts Art2 excerpts Communication2 excerpts Epistemology2 excerpts

True Eloquence's Paradox

True eloquence makes light of eloquence, true morality makes light of morality; that is to say, the morality of the judgment, which has no rules, makes light of the morality of the intellect. For it is to judgment that perception belongs, as science belongs to intellect. Intuition is the part of judgment, mathematics of intellect. To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Section II

Section II THE MISERY OF MAN WITHOUT GOD

81 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Human Nature18 excerpts Perception7 excerpts Vanity7 excerpts Deception5 excerpts Distraction5 excerpts

Man in the Infinite

Returning to himself, let man consider what he is in comparison with all existence; let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him estimate at their true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is a man in the Infinite? But to show him another prodigy equally astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let a mite be given him, with its minute body and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops. Dividing these last things again, let him exhaust his powers of conception, and let the last object at which he can arrive be now that of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature.

Section III

Section III OF THE NECESSITY OF THE WAGER

33 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Existence4 excerpts Infinity4 excerpts Mortality4 excerpts Faith3 excerpts Human Nature3 excerpts

Swallowed by Eternity

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?

Section IV

Section IV OF THE MEANS OF BELIEF

29 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Faith9 excerpts Reason8 excerpts Belief7 excerpts Religion5 excerpts Custom3 excerpts

Heart's Unknowable Reasons

The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. You have rejected the one, and kept the other. Is it by reason that you love yourself?

Section V

Section V JUSTICE AND THE REASON OF EFFECTS

33 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Justice12 excerpts Power8 excerpts Cultural Relativism4 excerpts Law4 excerpts Human Nature3 excerpts

Justice and Might

Justice, might.--It is right that what is just should be obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed. Justice without might is helpless; might without justice is tyrannical. Justice without might is gainsaid, because there are always offenders; might without justice is condemned. We must then combine justice and might, and for this end make what is just strong, or what is strong just.

Section VI

Section VI THE PHILOSOPHERS

39 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Human Nature9 excerpts Human Condition6 excerpts Reason4 excerpts Self-Awareness4 excerpts Truth4 excerpts

The Thinking Reed

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. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour, then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.

Section VII

Section VII MORALITY AND DOCTRINE

69 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Human Nature9 excerpts Self-Awareness9 excerpts Faith7 excerpts Religion6 excerpts Human Condition5 excerpts

Desire's Punishing Paradox

We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness. This desire is left to us, partly to punish us, partly to make us perceive wherefrom we are fallen.

Section VIII

Section VIII THE FUNDAMENTALS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

20 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Human Nature3 excerpts Prophecy3 excerpts Christian Theology2 excerpts Christian Doctrine1 excerpt Christian Religion1 excerpt

The Necessary Obscurity

If there were no obscurity, man would not be sensible of his corruption; if there were no light, man would not hope for a remedy. Thus, it is not only fair, but advantageous to us, that God be partly hidden and partly revealed; since it is equally dangerous to man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing God.

Section IX

Section IX PERPETUITY

14 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Religion3 excerpts Faith2 excerpts Ancient Wisdom1 excerpt Certainty1 excerpt Clarity Vs Obscurity1 excerpt

Spiritual vs Carnal Religion

Whoever judges of the Jewish religion by its coarser forms will misunderstand it. It is to be seen in the Holy Bible, and in the tradition of the prophets, who have made it plain enough that they did not interpret the law according to the letter. So our religion is divine in the Gospel, in the Apostles, and in tradition; but it is absurd in those who tamper with it. The Messiah, according to the carnal Jews, was to be a great temporal prince. Jesus Christ, according to carnal Christians, has come to dispense us from the love of God, and to give us sacraments which shall do everything without our help. Such is not the Christian religion, nor the Jewish. True Jews and true Christians have always expected a Messiah who should make them love God, and by that love triumph over their enemies.

Section X

Section X TYPOLOGY

15 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Interpretation3 excerpts Charity2 excerpts Christian Theology1 excerpt Christianity1 excerpt Contradiction1 excerpt

Charity as Reality

Charity is not a figurative precept. It is dreadful to say that Jesus Christ, who came to take away types in order to establish the truth, came only to establish the type of charity, in order to take away the existing reality which was there before. "If the light be darkness, how great is that darkness!"

Section XI

Section XI THE PROPHECIES

21 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Prophecy7 excerpts Divine Intervention2 excerpts Faith2 excerpts Human Condition2 excerpts Continuity Of Prophecy1 excerpt

Lost in the Universe

When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man, when I regard the whole silent universe, and man without light, left to himself, and, as it were, lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who has put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him at death, and incapable of all knowledge, I become terrified, like a man who should be carried in his sleep to a dreadful desert island, and should awake without knowing where he is, and without means of escape. And thereupon I wonder how people in a condition so wretched do not fall into despair. I see other persons around me of a like nature. I ask them if they are better informed than I am. They tell me that they are not. And thereupon these wretched and lost beings, having looked around them, and seen some pleasing objects, have given and attached themselves to them. For my own part, I have not been able to attach myself to them, and, considering how strongly it appears that there is something else than what I see, I have examined whether this God has not left some sign of Himself.

Section XII

Section XII PROOFS OF JESUS CHRIST

21 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Faith5 excerpts Charity3 excerpts Greatness3 excerpts Prophecy3 excerpts Wisdom2 excerpts

Mind Over Matter

All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not equal to the lowest mind; for mind knows all these and itself; and these bodies nothing. All bodies together, and all minds together, and all their products, are not equal to the least feeling of charity. This is of an order infinitely more exalted.

Section XIII

Section XIII THE MIRACLES

23 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Miracles14 excerpts Faith8 excerpts Belief7 excerpts Religion3 excerpts Truth3 excerpts

Truth's Shadow

Having considered how it comes that there are so many false miracles, false revelations, sorceries, etc., it has seemed to me that the true cause is that there are some true; for it would not be possible that there should be so many false miracles, if there were none true, nor so many false revelations, if there were none true, nor so many false religions, if there were not one true. For if there had never been all this, it is almost impossible that men should have imagined it, and still more impossible that so many others should have believed it. But as there have been very great things true, and as they have been believed by great men, this impression has been the cause that nearly everybody is rendered capable of believing also the false.

Section XIV

Section XIV APPENDIX: POLEMICAL FRAGMENTS

27 excerpts

Top themes in this chapter

Truth7 excerpts Religion4 excerpts Justice3 excerpts Tradition3 excerpts Church2 excerpts

Religious Conviction's Dark Power

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.