PASCAL PUMMELS MAN WITH HIS OWN CONCEIT

"What a chimera then is man! How strange and monstrous! A chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy. Judge of all things, yet a weak earth-worm; Depository of truth, yet a cesspool of uncertainty and error; The glory and scourge of the universe. Who will unravel such a tangle? ... No man, certainly, for Man is incomprehensible by man....


Man would fain be great, and sees that he is little;
Man would fain be happy, and sees that he is miserable;
Man would fain be perfect, and sees that he is full of imperfections; Man would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men, and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt;....
He conceives a mortal hatred against that truth - which blames him and convinces him of his faults."

Man's condition is characterized by boredom and anxiety. And by an inability to live fully in the moment:

"We might say, 'Live for the moment,' but we don't really mean it.
In fact, Man cares nothing for the present - we anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if we could make it move it faster.
Or, we call back the past, to stop its flight.

So imprudent are we that we ponder over times in which we have no part, thinking little of that which alone is ours, now;
So frivolous are we that we dream of days that are not yet, and pass without reflection those which alone exist, now.

For the present generally gives us pain.
And if by chance it be pleasant, we regret to see it vanish away.
We endeavor to sustain the present from the future, and think of arranging things not in our power ... Thus we never live, but hope to live, and while we always lay ourselves out to be happy, it is inevitable that we can never be so."

And in the end, "...the last act is tragic ... at the end a little earth is flung on our head, and is all over for ever." Arrestingly, Pascal compels us to, ... "imagine a number of men in chains, all condemned to death, of whom one is strangled every day in the sight of the others; those who remain see their own condition in that of their fellow, and wait their turn looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. This is an image of the lot of man.'

Man is, therefore, a wretched creature.
Yet, paradoxically, the intellectual awareness of his condition, however hard he tries to avoid facing it, is the very reason for whatever greatness, dignity, and worth might reside in him: "Man is only a reed, weakest in nature, but a reed which THINKS. It needs not that the whole universe should arm to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But, were the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which has slain him, because he KNOWS that he dies, and that the universe has the better of him. The universe knows nothing of this."

So, just what can possibly rescue Man from the despair that the awareness of his condition entails, which he unsuccessfully seeks to avoid through mindless activities?

Pascal's answer is unequivocal: religious faith.
The God who created the universe far exceeds human understanding, to be sure.
But God becomes comprehensible in his human form through our awareness of the life of Christ, the model for all of us to follow.
OUR misery derives from centering our lives upon our own self.
But happiness, should we aspire to it, rests instead upon making God the center of our lives and adjusting our thoughts and behavior accordingly.

As we know, it is ever more difficult in the West to find in Christianity the spiritual victuals that nourished Pascal's faith. It is not that the truths of this faith are any less truthful today, than they were in Pascals time - so what is the problem?
Well, as Aristotle once noted, the problem with Virtue is US.

The quest to find the kind of faith Pascal possessed has taken a disastrously individualistic turn, which makes the quest extremely difficult. Then too, a pervasive coarse and mindless mass culture makes the even more formidable, since it is just too easy to succumb to its diversions.

Yet even as we are realizing that the diverse forms of self-actualization and the arrogant dreams of triumphant science and technology are not our salvation,... we still persist in our backward notion that we can make them work, THIS TIME.

Pascal wrote that... "the heart has reasons that reason knows nothing about."
However, by 'heart', he did not mean vacuous Valentines Day sentiments, or the glorification of feelings and rhetorical unreason. Rather, the Heart is Pascals God-given organ of knowledge with which we sense a reality which pure reason and, "evidence" cannot by themselves arrive at.
In short, the Heart senses God.

For Pascal, we must possess three things if we are to glimpse, however dimly, the transcendent mystery of God hidden at the core of the universe and of our own lives....

1. The knowledge gathered through our senses
2. The application of such knowledge by our rational faculties, 3. The Heart as the basis of intuitive knowing  

We just choose to belligerently ignore #3. 

T.S. Eliot, nobel laureate poet of the 20th century, noted that no Christian author can be commended more than Pascal.
He said, '...He speaks to those who doubt, but who also have the mind to conceive and the sensibility to feel the disorder, the futility, the meaninglessness, the mystery of life and suffering, and who can only find peace through a satisfaction of the whole being'.

God would probably agree.

source: https://owlcation.com/humanities/A-Man-of-Science-and-Faith-Remote-Yet-Contemporary

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