PASCAL

There are certain figures in the history of human thought who in the

deepest sense of the word must be regarded as _tragic_; and this not

because of any accidental sufferings they have endured, or because

of any persecution, but because of something inherently _desperate_

in their own wrestling with truth.

Thus Swift, while an eminently tragic figure in regard to his

personal character and the events of his life, is not tragic in regard to

his thought.

It is not a question of pessimism. Schopenhauer is generally, and

with reason, regarded as a pessimist; but no one who has read his

"World as Will and Idea" can visualise Schopenhauer, even in the

sphere of pure thought, as a tragic personality.

The pre-eminent example in our modern world of the sort of

desperate thinking which I have in mind as worthy of this title is, of

course, Nietzsche; and it is a significant thing that over and over

again in Nietzsche's writings one comes upon passionate and

indignant references to Pascal.

The great iconoclast seemed indeed, as he groped about like a blind

Samson in the temple of human faith, to come inevitably upon the

figure of Pascal, as if this latter were one of the main pillars of the

formidable edifice. It is interesting to watch this passionate

attraction of steel for steel.

Nietzsche was constantly searching among apologists for

Christianity for one who in intellect and imagination was worthy of

his weapons; and it must be confessed that his search was generally

vain. But in Pascal he did find what he sought.

His own high mystical spirit with its savage psychological insight

was answered here by something of the same metal. His own

"desperate thinking" met in this instance a temper equally

"desperate," and the beauty and cruelty of his merciless imagination

met here a "will to power" not less abnormal.

It is seldom that a critic of a great writer has, by the lucky throwing

of life's wanton dice, an opportunity of watching the very temper he

is describing, close at hand. But it does sometimes happen, even

when the subject of one's criticism has been dead two hundred years,

that one comes across a modern mind so penetrated with its master's

moods; so coloured, so dyed, so ingrained with that particular spirit,

that intercourse with it implies actual contact with its archetype.

Such an encounter with the subtlest of Christian apologists has been

my own good fortune in my association with Mr. W. J. Williams,

the friend of Loisy and Tyrrel, and the interpreter, for modern piety,

of Pascal's deepest thoughts.

The superiority of Pascal over all other defenders of the faith is to be

looked for in the peculiar angle of his approach to the terrific

controversy--an angle which Newman himself, for all his serpentine

sagacity, found it difficult to retain.

Newman worked in a mental atmosphere singularly unpropitious to

formidable intellectual ventures, and one never feels that his

essentially ecclesiastical mind ever really grasped the human

plausibility of natural paganism. But Pascal went straight back to

Montaigne, and, like Pater's Marius under the influence of

Aristippus, begins his search after truth with a clean acceptance of

absolute scepticism.

Newman was sceptical too, but his peculiar kind of intellectual piety

lacked the imagination of Pascal. He could play, cleverly enough,

with hypothetical infidelity, and refute it, so to say, "in his study"

with his eye on the little chapel door; but there was a sort of refined

shrinking from the jagged edges of reality in his somewhat

Byzantine temperament which throws a certain suspicion of special

pleading over his crafty logic.

Newman argues like a subtle theologian who has been clever

enough to add to his "repertoire" a certain evasive mist of pragmatic

modernism, under the filmy and wavering vapours of which the

inveterate sacerdotalism of his temperament covers its tracks. But

with Pascal we get clean away from the poison-trail of the

obscurantist.

Pascal was essentially a layman. There was nothing priestly in his

mood; nothing scholastic in his reasoning; nothing sacerdotal in his

conclusions. We breathe with him the clear sharp air of mathematics;

and his imagination, shaking itself free from all controversial

pettifogging, sweeps off into the stark and naked spaces of the true

planetary situation.

One feels that Newman under all conceivable circumstances was

bound to be a priest. There was priestliness writ large upon his

countenance. His manner, his tone, his beautiful style, with

something at once pleading and threatening, and a kind of feminine

attenuation in its vibrant periods, bears witness to this.

Stripped of his cassock and tossed into the world's "hurly-burly,"

Newman would have drawn back into himself in Puritan dismay,

and with Puritan narrowness and sourness would have sneered at the

feet of the dancers. There was, at bottom, absolutely nothing in

Newman of the clear-eyed human sweetness of the Christ of the

Gospels; that noble, benignant, tolerant God, full of poetic

imagination, whose divine countenance still looks forth from the

canvasses of Titian.

Newman's piety, at best, was provincial, local, distorted. His Christ

is the Christ of morbid Seminarists and ascetic undergraduates; not

the Christ that Leonardo da Vinci saw breaking bread with his

disciples; not the Christ that Paolo Veronese saw moving among the

crowds of the street like a royal uncrowned king.

It is a mistake to regard Pascal as a Protestant. It is equally a mistake

to press hard upon his Catholicity. He was indeed too tragically

preoccupied with the far deeper question as to whether faith in

Christ is possible at all, to be limited to these lesser disputes.

His quarrel with the Jesuits was not essentially a theological quarrel.

It was the eternal quarrel between the wisdom and caution and

casuistry of the world and the uncompromising vision of the poet

and prophet.

Nietzsche would never have singled out Pascal as his most

formidable enemy if the author of "The Thoughts" had been nothing

but a theological controversialist. What gives an eternal value to

Pascal's genius, is that it definitely cleared the air. It swept aside all

blurring and confusing mental litter, and left the lamentable stage of

the great dilemma free for the fatal duel.

Out of the immense darkness of the human situation, that forlorn

stage rises. The fearful spaces of the godless night are its roof, and

row above row, tier above tier in its shadowy enclosure, the troubled

crowds of the tribes of men wait the wavering issue of the contest.

Full on the high stage in this tragic theatre of the universe Pascal

throws the merciless searchlight of his imaginative logic, and the

rhythm of the duality of man's fate is the rhythm of the music of his

impassioned utterances.

The more one dreams over the unique position which Pascal has

come to occupy, the more one realises how few writers there are

whose imagination is large enough to grapple with the sublime

horror of being born of the human race into this planetary system.

They take for granted so many things, these others. They have no

power in them to lift eagle wings and fly over the cold grey

boundless expanse of the shadowy waters.

They take for granted--materialists and mystics alike--so much; so

much, that there is no longer any tragic dilemma left, any sublime

"parting of the ways," any splendid or terrible decision.

Pascal's essential grandeur consists in the fact hat he tore himself

clear of all those peddling and pitiful compromises, those half

humorous concessions, those lazy conventionalisms, with which

most people cover their brains as if with wool, and ballast their

imagination as if with heavy sand.

He tore himself clear of everything; of his own temperamental

proclivities, of his pride, of his scientific vanity, of his human

affections, of his lusts, of his innocent enjoyments. He tore himself

clear of everything; so as to envisage the universe in its unmitigated

horror, so as to look the emptiness of space straight between its

ghastly lidless eyes.

One sees him there, at the edge of the world, silhouetted against the

white terror of infinity, wrestling desperately in the dawn with the

angel of the withheld secret.

His pride--his pride of sheer intellect--ah! that, as Nietzsche well

knew, was the offering that had the most blood in it, the sacrifice

that cried the loudest, as he bound it to the horns of the altar. The

almost insane howl of suppressed misery which lurks in the

scoriating irony of that terrible passage about sprinkling oneself with

"holy water" and rendering oneself "stupid," is an indication of what

I mean. Truly, as his modern representative does not hesitate to hint,

the hand of Pascal held Christianity by the hair.

To certain placid cattle-like minds, the life we have been born into is

a thing simple and natural enough. To Pascal it was monstrously and

insolently unnatural. He had that species of grand and terrible

imagination which is capable of piercing the world through and

through; of rising high up above it, and of pulverising it with

impassioned logic.

The basic incongruities of life yawned for him like bleeding

eye-sockets, and never for one moment could he get out of his mind

the appalling nothingness of the stellar spaces.

Once, after thinking about Pascal, I dreamed I saw him standing, a

tall dark figure, above a chaotic sea. In his hand he held a gigantic

whip, whose long quivering lash seemed, as he cracked it above the

moaning waters, to summon the hidden monsters of the depths to

rise to the surface. I could not see in my dream the face of this figure,

for dark clouds kept sweeping across his head; but the sense of his

ferocious loneliness took possession of me, and since then I have

found it increasingly difficult to confine his image to mild

Jansenistic heresies, ironic girdings at Jesuitical opponents,

philosophic strolls with evangelical friends.

What Pascal does is a thing that, curiously enough, is very rarely

done, even by great metaphysical writers; I mean the bringing home

to the mind, without any comfortable illusive softenings of the stark

reality, of what life really implies in its trenchant outlines. To do this

with the more complete efficacy, he goes back to Montaigne and

uses the scepticism of Montaigne as his starting point.

The Christian faith, in order to be a thing of beauty and dignity,

must necessarily have something _desperate_ about it, something of

the terrible sweat and tears of one who wrestles with the ultimate

angel. Easy-going Christianity, the Christianity of plump prelates

and argumentative presbyters, is not Christianity at all. It is simply

the "custom of the country" greased with the unction of professional

interests.

One remembers how both Schopenhauer and Heine sweep away the

Hegelian Protestantism of their age and look for the spirit of Christ

in other quarters.

That so tremendous a hope, that so sublime a chance should have

appeared at all in the history of the human race is a thing to wonder

at; and Pascal, coming upon this chance, this hope, this supreme

venture, from the depths of a corrosive all-devouring scepticism,

realised it at its true value.

Hung between the infinitely great and the infinitely little, frozen by

the mockery of two eternities, this "quintessence of dust" which is

ourselves, cries aloud to be delivered from the body of its living

death.

A reed that thinks! Could there anywhere be found a better

description of what we are? Reed-like we bow ourselves to the

winds of the four horizons--reed-like we murmur repetitions of the

music of forest and sea--reed-like we lift our heads among the dying

stalks of those who came before us--reed-like we wither and droop

when our own hour comes--but with it all, we _think!_

Pascal looking at the face of the world sees evidence on all sides of

the presence of something blighting and poisonous, something

diabolic and malign in the way things are now organised. He traces

the cause of this to the wilful evil in the heart of man, and he finds

the only cure for it in the acceptance of God's grace.

There may be something irritating to the pagan mind about this

arbitrary introduction of the idea of "sin" as the cause of the

lamentable misery of the world. Among modern writers the idea of

"sin" is ridiculed, and the notion of its supernaturalism scouted. But

is this true psychology?

Whatever its extraordinary origin, this thing which we call

"conscience" has emerged as a definite and inalienable phenomenon

among us. To be exempt from the power of _remorse_ is still, even

in these modern days, to be something below or above the level of

ordinary humanity. If the thing is everywhere present with us, then,

as an actual undeniable experience; if we feel it, if we suffer from it,

where is the philosophical or human advantage of slurring over its

existence and refusing to take account of it?

The great artists are wiser in these matters than the philosophers.

Are we to suppose that the depths of malignity in an Iago, or the

"dark backward and abysm" of remorse in a Macbeth, are things

purely relative and illusive?

"Hell is murky," whispers the sleep-walker, and the words touch the

nerves of our imagination more closely than all the arguments of the

evolutionists.

We will not follow Pascal through the doctrinal symbols of his

escape from the burden of this consciousness. Where we must still

feel the grandeur of his imagination is in his recognition of the

presence of "evil" in the world as an objective and palpable thing

which no easy explanations can get rid of and only a stronger

spiritual force can overcome.

The imagination of Pascal once more makes life terrible, beautiful

and dramatic. It pushes back the marble walls of mechanical cause

and effect, and opens up the deep places. It makes the universe

porous again. It restores to life its strange and mysterious

possibilities. It throws the human _will_ once more into the

foreground, and gives the drama of our days its rightful spaciousness

and breadth.

The kind of religious faith which lends itself to our sense of the

noble and the tragic is necessarily of this nature. Like the tight-rope

dancer in Zarathustra, it balances itself between the upper and the

nether gulfs. It makes its choice between eternal issues; it throws the

dice upon the cosmic gaming-table; it wagers the safety of the soul

against the sanity of the intellect.

And it is pre-eminently the mark of a great religion that it should be

founded upon a great scepticism. Anything short of this lacks the

true tragic note; anything short of this is mere temperamental

cheerfulness, mere conventional assent to custom and tradition.

The great religion must carve its daring protest against the whole

natural order of the universe upon the flaming ramparts of the

world's uttermost boundary. The great religion must engrave its

challenge to eternity upon the forehead of the Great Sphinx.

And after all, even supposing that Pascal is wrong; even supposing

that making his grand wager he put his money upon the _wrong

horse_, does that diminish the tragedy of his position? Does that

lessen the sublimity of his imagination? Obviously it is the practical

certainty that he is wrong, and that he did put his money on the

wrong horse, which creates the grandeur of the whole desperate

business. If he were right, if the universe were really and truly

composed in the manner he conceived it--why then, so far from his

figure being a tragic one, he would present himself as a shrewd

magician, who has found the "wonderful lamp" of the world's

Aladdin's cave, and has entered upon inestimable treasures while

disappearing into the darkness.

The sublimity of Pascal's vision depends upon its being illusive. The

grandeur of his world-logic depends upon its being false. The beauty

of his heroic character depends upon his philosophy being a lie.

If all that is left of this desperate dicer with eternity is a little dust

and a strangely shaped skull, how magnificently dramatic, in the

high classic sense, was his offering up of his intellect upon the altar

of his faith!

In the wise psychology of the future--interesting itself in the historic

aberrations of the human mind--it is likely that many chapters will

be devoted to this strange "disease of desperation" full of such wild

and fatal beauty.

The Spectacle of the world will lack much contrasting shadow when

this thing passes away. A _certain deep crimson upon black_ will be

missing from the tapestry of human consciousness. There will be

more sun-light but less Rembrantian chiaroscuro in the pigments of

the great Picture. At any rate this is certain; by his tragic gambling

in the darkness of the abyss between the unfathomed spaces, Pascal

has drawn the perilous stuff of the great disease to a dramatic head.

The thing can no longer diffuse itself like an attenuated evil humour

through every vein of the world-body.

Customary piety, conventional religion, the thin security of

self-satisfied morality, can now no more tease us with their sleek

impertinence. In the presence of a venture of this high distinction, of

a faith of this tragic intensity, such shabby counterfeits of the race's

hope dwindle and pale and fade.

We now perceive what the alternative is, what the voice of "deep

calling unto deep" really utters, as the constellation of Hercules

draws the solar world toward it through the abysmal night. No more

ethical foolery; no more pragmatic insolence; no more mystical

rhetoric.

The prophets of optimism "lie in hell like sheep." The world yawns

and quivers to its foundations. Jotunheim rushes upon Asgard. From

the pleasant fields of sun-lit pagan doubt comes to our ears the

piping of the undying Pan--older than all the "twilights" of all the

"gods."

But for the rest the issue is now plain, the great dilemma clear. No

more fooling with shadows when faith has lost its substance;

no more walking on the road to Emmaus when the Master is

transformed to a stream of tendency; no more liberal theology when

Socrates is as divine as Jesus.

The "Thinking Reed" bows before the wind of the infinite spaces. It

bows. It bends. It is broken.

Aut Christus aut Nihil!