Introduction

During the past thirty years or so, historical performance in theory and practice has truly established itself as a vibrant part of the orchestral scene. Period instruments are routinely encountered in the concert hall from San Francisco to Budapest and from Toronto to Rio de Janeiro; indeed, they have become virtually obligatory in substantial areas of the orchestral repertory. There is now a widespread interest in recreating the original sounds and styles of a composer's own time and in acquiring appropriate instruments and technique. Meanwhile, the entire focus of such endeavours has been subject to stimulating discussion and argument. It cannot be denied that artistic life today makes demands which are decidedly unhistorical; for example, the microphone introduces a set of parameters which would have been unthinkable in previous generations. Furthermore, air travel has wrought such changes that we do not have the option to turn back the clock. Nevertheless, examination of a variety of primary sources, complementing tradition and intuition, enables earlier styles of performance to be explored; for, as Roger Norrington has remarked, ‘a relationship with the past needs to be founded on truth as well as sympathy, concern as well as exploitation, information as well as guesswork’.

Historical awareness in performance has a long and fascinating pedigree, which has been traced in some detail by Harry Haskell and others. In the late nineteenth century there finally sprang a growing desire to investigate instruments and performing styles that were contemporary with and appropriate to earlier music. At this time of great technological development, there was lively discussion as to whether orchestral instruments had been improving or had merely changed. For example, Wagner was in no doubt that in Beethoven’s symphonies valved trumpets and horns should be used rather than their natural precursors; he rewrote their parts to remove any supposed limitations.

We know little about Pascal. We also know a great deal about Pascal. We know little in the sense that Pascal never wrote about himself or his life in any detail, while contemporaries who did write about him offered something close to hagiography. We know a great deal about him in the sense that his writings on science and human nature, society and salvation, tell us much about his view of the world and the developments of his day. We know or can confidently infer, to take a few random examples, how he perceived birth and death, royalty and papacy, Epictetus and Descartes, hare coursing and theatre-going, the execution of Charles I and the Peace of the Pyrenees. Indeed, to the extent that his perceptions were always fresh and insightful - and that taken together they offer an almost unfathomably original and subtle philosophical vision - it is easy to feel that we know him intimately.

CHILDHOOD

France of the 1620s and 1630s, the France in which Pascal was raised, was one of Europe’s major powers, the centre of a vibrant movement of Catholic renewal and of an increasingly educated and refined ruling class. But it was also a place of seething conflict and chronic political instability. The Wars of Religion, which very nearly led to the permanent break-up of France, had come to an end in 1594, when Henri IV took Paris, but civil war – identified by Pascal as ‘the worst of evils’ – remained a very real peril (L 94/S 128).

Suppose there is a plausible model of the atmosphere in which global warming will lead to the extinction of humankind unless the consumption of fossil fuel is reduced drastically. Even though the probability of this outcome is small or indeterminate, it is in some hard-to-explicate sense a 'real' one. The implications for action seem compelling: even if the use of fossil fuel has many indubitable benefits, it ought to be curtailed drastically. No finite gain can outweigh the 'real' possibility of the extinction of humankind. On reflection, however, this conclusion is too quick. For suppose there is also a plausible socioeconomic model in which reduced use of fossil fuel leads to global economic collapse, which leads to nuclear war and to a nuclear winter that causes the extinction of humankind. Now, what do we do?

Readers of this volume are likely to recognise the structure of Pascal’sWager and of the many-gods objection to Pascal’s argument. In this chapter I try to reconstitute some of the context of Pascal’s Wager and to assess the validity of the argument. I carefully say ‘some’ of the context, as the theological debates in which Pascal’s argument is embedded are highly complex and well beyond my expertise. Although I have been greatly assisted by Leszek Kolakowski’s acute and irreverent God Owes Us Nothing, I do not claim that standing on his shoulders enables me to see as far as he did.

In a letter of 1660 to Pierre Fermat, Pascal describes geometry in the following terms:

This paradoxical praise of geometry addressed to a man he considered a great mathematician is one of many texts where Pascal expresses doubts regarding human knowledge.

Anceps fortuna aequitate rationis reprimitur

Before the time of Pascal there was no theory of probability, merely an understanding (itself incomplete) of how to compute 'chances' in gaming with dice and cards by counting equally probable outcomes. In addition, problems encountered in the enumeration of dice throws and the counting of arrangements and selections of things had led to an incipient mathematical theory of combinations and permutations, but the rules that appeared in the works of such authors as Tartaglia (1500-57) and Cardano (1501-76) still had the form of recipes rather than as parts of a coherent whole. It fell to Pascal to bring together the separate threads and weave them into a structure that enabled him to progress far beyond his predecessors by introducing entirely new mathematical techniques for the solution of problems that had hitherto resisted solution, techniques which became the foundation of the modern theory of probability.

Pascal’s influence was not direct, for none of his writings on probability were published during his lifetime, but instead was transmitted via Huygens to James Bernoulli, where it appeared in the latter’s influential Ars conjectandi of 1713, and via the Essay d’analyse sur les jeux de hazard of Montmort, first published in 1708. These two books, together with De Moivre’s The Doctrine of Chances (1718), firmly established probability theory as a branch of mathematics. Later scholarship has confirmed the view that Pascal may justly be regarded as the father of the theory of probability.

Pascal's philosophy of science did not result from a detached philosophical reflection on the scientific achievements of others. It was honed, instead, in his intense, personal involvement in the religious and philosophical controversies that convulsed the kingdom of Louis XIV in the middle of the seventeenth century, and in which this notoriously combative defender of Jansenism played a leading role. The scope of Pascal's own scientific work was modest, and was primarily concerned with pneumatics. However, the experimental character of his research was such that it provoked discussion of a number of important issues that were implicit in the new mechanical philosophy, including its relationship to traditional metaphysics. In fact, Pascal's appeal to experimental evidence in support of his scientific theories against critics provided an ideal vantage point from which to address critically the epistemology of science, and to compare the certainty or otherwise of its theoretical claims with dogmatic religious teaching and with the traditional philosophy of the schools. This focus on the relative certainty of competing types of belief - scientific, religious or philosophical - and on alternative strategies for resolving apparent conflicts between them, was not unique in the scientific revolution. Many scientists, from Galileo to Newton, addressed similar questions. In the case of Pascal, however, the intensity of his personal faith and his public commitment to the rigorous piety of Jansenism made it impossible for him not to reflect on the status of scientific results that were confirmed by what appeared to be incontrovertible experimental evidence. It is easy to understand, in retrospect, how the focus of Pascal's philosophy of science was the role of experimental evidence in the confirmation and disconfirmation of scientific theories.

In some real sense, the Bible we read today is not at all the same Bible that Blaise Pascal used to document his apology. The mental universe of the cultivated French person between 1650 and 1700, Philippe Sellier reminds us, is replete with what for us are amazing lacunae. The reader must play ethnologist in order to engage in dialogue with writers or thinkers who date the creation from the year 4004 BC or think they know the exact date of the Flood. Indeed, it is truly impossible to understand fully a Pascal or a Bossuet without knowing their vision of the world and history, a vision in which the Bible not only stands at the centre, but also limits the scope of the inquiry.

Sellier estimates that of the approximately 800 fragments we read as the Pensées, about 80 per cent belong to Pascal's unfinished notes for his Apology for the Christian Religion. Of those fragments, at least 200 relate directly or indirectly to Pascal's project of scriptural exegesis. Why, then, has this considerable body of material suffered such neglect at the hands of readers and scholars alike?

Pascal states that faith is a gift of God, not the result of a process of reasoning (Pensées, L 7, 588/S 41, 487). In which case, we might ask, what is the point of an apology for the Christian religion? Suppose I am persuaded to adopt Christianity by arguments for the existence of God, and then for the unique status of Christianity as a divine revelation: in that case, my belief will be based on the human faculty of reasoning, and faith is not necessarily a gift of God. Or if faith is a gift of God, why should I trouble to study the proofs of Christianity? If God intends me to have faith, He will give it; if I do not have it, is that my fault? God could have given it to me, and has not. In either case, where is the place for argument?

Another problem. Pascal elsewhere says that the would-be but not-yet believer should fulfil the external rituals of religion: taking holy water and so forth. That will bring about belief: ‘Cela vous fera croire’ (L 418/S 680). In other words, the way to belief is through forsaking one’s human faculty of reasoning (refraining from asking what possible good holy water can do me) and adopting a purely mechanical mode of behaviour that puts one on a level with the animals (‘cela vous abêtira’).1 In this case also, where is the gift of God?

Although Pascal's social and political thought may seem at first glance to be of rather marginal interest, it is my aim in this chapter to show that elements of the sociopolitical form a fully coherent doctrine within a system where anthropology and theology meet. Pascal holds that if men are as they are and act as they do, it is because they have been both created by God and abandoned by God as a consequence of original sin. The establishment of a social and political order is necessary to curb the disorder catalysed by original sin, even if such a measure can only attenuate the effects of the Fall without addressing their root cause. I intend here to take such comments further and to suggest that Pascal's reflections on social and political order are to be related to his theory of the different orders of existence, and thus that they have consequences far beyond a limited sociopolitical sphere. If original sin deprived humankind of God, of the true and the good, nonetheless it did not destroy our capacity to attain these. From the moment that human beings judge things in relation to themselves instead of in relation to God, so Pascal argues, they embrace the false and the evil, disguising these as the truth and goodness of which they are capable and which remain in them as traces. Thus Christians are, for Pascal, faced with the need for a dual awareness. They are obliged to confess that men are abandoned to their own limited vision, unable to discern what is true and good. But they are obliged also to apply the insights of Christianity to human discourse as it confuses and blurs true and false, good and evil. In this way they can arrive at an understanding of the ultimate order and truth of this discourse.

The discernible traces of Montaigne's and Descartes' works in Pascal's writings, whether explicit or implicit, result from deliberate choices of reading, determined ultimately by Pascal's eventual vocation as an apologist for the Christian religion. Pascal's interest in Descartes was, in its early stages, associated with Pascal's own purely scientific and mathematical pursuits. However, his engagement with the Discourse on Method, the Meditations and the Principles of Philosophy, as more directly with his discovery of Montaigne, must be situated among other sorts of reading deriving from more purely religious preoccupations. Before embarking on the inheritance of Montaigne and Descartes in Pascal's writing, it is essential to explore briefly some of what we know more generally of Pascal's reading habits at crucial times of his life.

Pascal’s scientific culture was first developed through his father’s contact with the circle of Father Marin Mersenne, who acted as one of the major disseminators of new scientific thinking and who was, in particular, responsible for obtaining critical views on Descartes’ Meditations, including those of Antoine Arnauld, the major polemicist among the Port-Royal Solitaires.

The Lettres provinciales are the single polemical work of the French seventeenth century to have survived into posterity, and it is not difficult to see the reasons for their enduring appeal, by comparison both with the publications that were produced by the Society of Jesus in reply to the later pieces in the series, and with the whole unwieldy corpus of writing that was soon to bear witness to the quietist dispute. There is, of course, an equivalent mass of technical theological material underpinning the Provinciales, but, at least in the first ten letters, it is sufficiently concealed to allow the fictional exchanges the highest possible degree of autonomy and thus accessibility. Only when we reach the later pieces do we become aware of the intertextual and contextual dimensions of the writing; and it could indeed be argued that the letters that follow the shift of perspective effected by the eleventh move progressively towards the kind of more detailed internecine dispute which in fact more typically reflects religious disagreement in the period.

Pascal's contributions to physics might appear limited: his research was confined to the investigation of the vacuum and the statics of fluids, and only a few relatively brief publications resulted. These include the Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide (1647), Récit de la grande expérience de l'équilibre des liqueurs (1648), and Traités de l'équilibre des liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la masse de l'air, which were published posthumously in 1664. However, these works are still admired for their rigour and held up as models of empirical investigation. Pascal's experiments were carefully designed to converge on the causes of phenomena. In his posthumous works especially, equally important to the design of his experiments was the manner in which he presented them to his readers, placing them in an order which, with his accompanying analysis, extended a few simple principles to a wide variety of phenomena and produced an illuminating synthesis of existing knowledge.

Pascal is a name familiar to students and scholars in an astonishingly wide range of disciplines. Mathematicians recognise him through Pascal's Triangle or Pascal's calculating machine (which itself gave its name to a computer language). Physicists and historians of science (as well as those in technological fields) acknowledge his pioneering work on the vacuum. The word jesuitical owes its pejorative sense exclusively to Pascal's blistering satirical attack on the Society of Jesus in his Provincial Letters. Students of philosophy and theology know him through Pascal's famous Wager, which itself forms part of one of the most renowned pieces of religious apologetics, the Pensées. Even early forms of train-spotter (or, rather, coach-spotter) have cause to be grateful to him for helping to set up the first public transport system in Paris. It is a sobering thought that he achieved all this, having suffered from years of ill health, before the age of 39, when he died.

The idea of a philosophical method is more commonly associated with Descartes than it is with Pascal. In his Discourse on the Method for Conducting One's Reason Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences, first published in 1637, Descartes asserts that, in order to be successful, the search for philosophical and scientific truths has to obey a fixed set of guidelines. In contrast, Pascal generally uses the term method ironically and pejoratively. In the Provincial Letters the various techniques used by the Jesuits to twist the precepts of conventional morality are often referred to as a method. In the Pensées, the word method is almost entirely absent. There exists one work, however, where Pascal uses the term in a non-pejorative way: a small, unfinished treatise written around 1655 and entitled Mathematical Mind (De l'esprit géométrique). In a bold claim reminiscent of Descartes' Discourse on Method, Pascal presents the treatise as 'the method for mathematical [i.e., methodical and perfect] demonstrations' (OC i i , 155). More generally, he presents mathematical reasoning as the model that one should emulate in every intellectual activity. A study of Pascal's philosophical method must thus begin with an analysis of Mathematical Mind.

The first commentary on the Pensées, before the Port-Royal edition was even published, is to be found in the Logique de Port-Royal (1662), the manual of logic edited by the theologians of Port-Royal, Arnauld and Nicole, who sought to establish a synthesis between Augustine, Descartes and Pascal. This attempt was significant because of the very nature of Pascal's thought and of the philosophy he attributes to his unbelieving interlocutor in the Pensées: that philosophy is inspired by Gassendi, particularly by Gassendi's Objections to Descartes' Meditations (French translation by Clerselier, 1647). Not that Gassendi was himself an unbeliever: despite R. Pintard's efforts to read irony and hypocrisy between the lines, most modern interpreters accept that Gassendi was an orthodox believer, but his philosophy inspired a number of notorious unbelievers, among whom Cyrano de Bergerac is the most prominent. Not that Pascal could have read Cyrano: the chronology of their writing and publication made that impossible. But Pascal did perceive, in the alliance between the philosophy of sociability - honnêteté - theorised by Méré and the sceptical philosophy inherited from Montaigne and modernised by Gassendi, a major threat to Christian doctrine, and he deliberately elaborated his apologetic arguments in order to resist that threat. The very structure of the apologetic argument in the Pensées requires that the unbeliever be led from principles he recognises and adopts to acceptance of the Christina doctrine which he initially refuses. Pascal thus attributes Gassendist principles to his unbeliever and builds his apology on those foundations.