Visite à Pascal
Visit to Pascal
Suares
At Port-Royal
One day when the tumult of calumny and invective had spread most insolently through Paris, troubling that abusive city to its depths, M. de Seipse, unable to endure it any longer, resolved to flee it and went to the country. M. de Seipse suffered from the disorder as from a personal insult that his times had dealt him, as though the whole populace had conspired to inflict it. A deep anger, cold and secret, devoured him at feeling within himself the power of order, knowing himself to possess the will for it, and knowing that it must remain without effect. The power of a man is the mean between what he can do himself and what circumstances permit him — the accord of his own strength with the fatality of events. That is why every powerful man has always felt himself within a hair’s breadth of not being powerful; and he calls his star that happy accident which suffices for nothing in itself, but without which the way is closed to everything else. Chance, which causes a man to be born at his hour, does more for him than he will ever do for himself. Within ten years one way or the other, one is Caesar or one is not. By one more or fewer feature in the face, and the nose shaped in a pleasing form, one may or may not exercise the right of power one possesses. If he cannot exercise it, a man then exercises it against himself. And the more disordered facts obstruct him, the more bitterly he suffers from feeling within himself the force that would set them in order. Stirred by these thoughts, M. de Seipse resolved to calm them, if not to distract himself from them, and proposed to himself a walk through the most austere and secluded valley to be found at the gates of Paris: he went to Port-Royal-des-Champs.
It was the season of Pentecost. Spring was turning to summer; it was already warm; and cloudy days, heavy with storm, followed ponderously upon nights still cool. Having set out early in the morning, M. de Seipse arrived at the Abbey before midday. The sky, which had at first been admirably clear, soon clouded over. The tender blue, delicate and deep, that is proper to the Ile-de-France, filled with woolly, grayish clouds; and the air, which had been fresh, stifled by the clouds, grew heavy. The blue sky of France is neither implacable nor sublime like the gaze of a god: it has rather the fine complaisance of a human eye; and when it veils itself, it invites reflection or ennui rather than anger. So M. de Seipse counted himself fortunate that the weather accorded with his various thoughts. He had come by carriage, across fields wet with dew, fresh and limpid as the morning itself, the sky clear and the wind light. The green wheat and the already tall oats, with their slate-colored reflections, quivered in the plain, where sometimes one saw in the distance — as one insect follows another — a plow guided by a peasant.
As one approaches Port-Royal, the country grows more deserted. One sees nothing but hamlets crouching level with the earth. The harsh plateau reigns; and the horizon recedes, grave and sad, as everything that is great. There, if the sky casts a darker glance, frowning with clouds and laden even with menace, it seems only to render, as a faithful mirror, the soul of the place. In all things, we have to do only with the soul, and as it is with men, if a country does not yield us its own, it has nothing for us. At the slope of this plateau whose aspect, serious at all times, is tragic when the sun hides itself there, one drops into a narrow valley; by a rough path, among the trees, one descends to the bottom of a sort of hollow where, enclosed by high walls and veiled beneath the foliage, the abbey of Port-Royal had been founded.
The abbey was once vast, the buildings considerable. There were several blocks of structures. The house where the solitaries lodged faced the cloister where the Daughters of the Holy Sacrament had vowed themselves to perpetual adoration. In an illustrious school, children were taught, among whom was Racine. A chapel was the place of assembly where so many men, women, and small creatures so dissimilar gathered in a common thought: in spite of everything, the mark of it remained indelible, so deeply had it bitten into the soul.
A garden separated the house of the religious women from that of the Messieurs. The children lodged in a low wing where catechisms were held. The orchard, the kitchen garden, spread beyond like the testimony of the labor perhaps most agreeable to heaven. The perfection of the simple and peaceful man is, without doubt, that of the lay brother, who passes from the fields to the chapel, from the spade to the psalter, and who, for his recreation, bows before God the shoulders that, the rest of the time, toil bends toward the earth.
Save for a rustic tower at one of the wings, nothing remains of the whole abbey: a patient hatred, indefatigable in a word, prepared this ruin and consummated it. The plow has passed over the cloister. The tombs of the Jansenists have been turned up by the plowshare. Louis XIV scattered into dust one of the moral forces, perhaps the most solid and most compact that existed in France. Men lived there with their cemetery before their eyes, and had it for their place of promenade. It must have mattered little to them whether their ashes were or were not at rest. One can even imagine the bitter satisfaction of Pascal, had he been able to foresee that his bones would be cast to the wind. To say nothing of his joy at suffering persecution for truth and justice, he would have rejoiced ardently at this outrage to the enemy flesh: and he would have seen in it some singular favor bestowed upon his soul.
The Messieurs of Port-Royal were not clerics. Some did not judge themselves worthy; others were repelled by nature or by their station. They formed a kind of third order. They were scarcely laymen, and did not wish to be monks. They lived to work out their salvation, and claimed to do so in the world, or resigned themselves to it. Port-Royal was their house of retreat. They came there to draw nearer to God. They lent there an ear more attentive than they could have elsewhere or otherwise. There they held their thousand conversations with a power feared, and desired with all their vows, as the only one to be dreaded without doubt, but also the only one that could help. In a time when every man wished, sooner or later, to gain some knowledge of himself, nowhere did they go further in the cruel art of self-knowledge than in that austere company. Now the scandal is great, for an absolute monarch, of men who withdraw into themselves: for there are none, whatever their revolt, who escape him more; and, moreover, those who know themselves without indulgence are, despite everything, without indulgence in knowing others. Absolute sovereigns do not love that sort of sovereignty; the more it keeps silent, the more it defies them. Its very respect is a form of contempt, for it judges. Sovereigns who are such in the order of the flesh hate the sovereignty that belongs to another order and escapes theirs. The more humble it is in conduct, the more it humbles them, since it leaves them no hold upon it, and rises doubtless above even what it lays low. That is why the absolute sovereign, be his name Louis XIV, Napoleon, or the People, distrusts solitaries and strikes them. There must not be too many saints in the State, nor even in the world; still less a school of holiness: holiness threatens nature, and nature wants only slaves or false witnesses: it hates judges.
At the turn of the sunken path, a wooden door in a stone frame, surmounted by an iron cross: this is the entrance to the abbey.
As I was about to knock there myself, I saw M. de Seipse push the door, doubtless left ajar; he crossed the threshold, and I followed him. I have known M. de Seipse a long time and hold him in esteem. We share some thoughts, but I see him seldom. At the grating sound of the gate on its hinge, M. de Seipse turned his head, already displeased at not finding solitude even at Port-Royal. I had felt the same annoyance at seeing myself preceded at the door. But he recognized me at once, as I had just done; we each felt that the other’s presence need take nothing from the charm of the solitary visit each had planned; and that our silence need not be broken except at the occasion of a shared emotion, the better to savor it.
Once through the door, one is in the fields of Port-Royal. One walks in the midst of an enclosed countryside. First a path between two meadows, where cornflowers bloom in the green grass and a few poppies burst like cries of joy. Then, on both sides, the space widens. The sloping ground goes by leaps from left to right, where, like a bed, the bottom of the valley hollows out. A few steps, and one discovers the whole horizon of the solitary valley. It seems closed on all sides, like a basin of earth hidden among wooded hills. The trees veil the open rim of this trench. The sky seems to pour its light from a greater height than over the plain. The crown of foliage set upon the heights girds them with a clear and pensive shadow. Everything here is gathered upon itself and leaning toward the depths. And everything, within these narrow limits, in the manner of recollection, speaks of an intimate grandeur.
The lilacs, nearly spent, swayed here and there their flowering branches, whose clusters the wind stirred. A little rain had fallen, which the earth, the meadows, and all the leaves returned in moist perfumes. One heard the soft murmur of a spring, and the reign of beautiful silence. These fields seemed uncultivated, and were the purer for it. A house in one corner, from which an avenue of trees departed; and at the hollow of the trench, a new chapel, whose dry lines and too-white stones offend the eye.
It is there that pious men have gathered what they could find that came from the Jansenists. They have raised this little church to a worship they cannot accustom themselves to believe has vanished. At the foot of the chapel, on one side, the remains of the cemetery have been arranged: for hatred and destruction here laid so avid a hand that even the tombs were removed, and the only debris are the remains of remains, the relics of death, and not even of life. A small sanded space, enclosed between low walls, where tombstones lean, and which seems made for an assembly, stretches before the chapel. A few steps lead to the portal; the last forms a broad terrace, where the foliage and the lilacs add the grace of a charming adornment. Where admirable art does not raise its song, nature alone can speak. Whatever its lie or cruelty, if its language has the sole seduction one cannot resist, the accent that persuades.
One feels it too keenly at the encounter with two bronze busts on the steps leading to this church of relics. It is Pascal and Racine who have been placed there, despite themselves, on these steps, to receive all manner of people, the very sort whose visit they would have declined with the most horror perhaps, or at least with the most ennui. Racine may pass; and let them also place the great Arnauld, if they insist. But Pascal! He did not care to be paid such an honor. If only these busts were merely ridiculous: but they are extremely impertinent, and Pascal’s is not even decent, so much does it lack the true resemblance, which is of the soul; and so much does it partake of that self-assured fatuity into which the common model they have before their eyes has ended by forcing sculptors to range all great men.
Pascal
The museum, in the form of a chapel, contains a few portraits. On one side the doctors, the religious women on the other. Above the door, Jansenius. The Bishop of Ypres has a learned, systematic, stubborn, narrow, and cold air; a high forehead, a pointed face, not without cunning. M. de Saint-Cyran shows a face already of another age: a violent energy, an obstinate force, the face of a man who wields the sword and the pen with the same arm; a man of the time of the League, capable of campaigning and of holding his ground against an army; not a doctor, but a theologian in arms; his beard gray and coarse, his complexion warm, his air sanguine, the accent of action, the crease of anger. The great Arnauld justifies his name: a vast and strong head, a powerful skull, the forehead high, broad, straight, a fortress of doctrine, a citadel of erudition and theology. His mother, the foundress of the abbey, is the manifest source of that force, the base of the edifice: she is a rough woman, thick, limbed like a man. Nothing gentle, nor even of her sex. Hair on her lips; sturdy flesh despite the austerities; beneath the fat, one feels the bones, big and broad: there is the mother of a formidable family in number and resources; everything in her is solid, willful, nourished with substance and reason. Whoever sees her, and the great Arnauld beside her, knows at once on whom the whole establishment of the Jansenists rested. And, likewise, whoever looks at his granddaughter admires the delicate and pale flower that a strong race of men or minds is destined to produce, by which at least it ends. The second Angelique makes with M. Hamon a delightful pair whose grace seduces the heart. M. Hamon has the charming and fine face of a young girl or an adolescent prince: blond, pale, the thinnest lips, a candid and tender air, his chin pointed; all his strength is in his eyes, like that of Sister Angelique. And yet it is not a robust soul that shows through them; but the fire of a mystical soul, enamored of divine love. However strong it may be, it is no longer strong enough for life; capable of sustaining every struggle, it is not capable of conquering, in a secret desire to exhaust the delight of being conquered; or rather, what strength it has applies itself only to a nobler course: the flesh yields here to the spirit it imprisons, and the envelope is too fragile for what it contains.
Pascal, however, is like neither the one nor the other. He is without ties. His ugliness is alive. His death mask alone is beautiful: both equally strange, out of place and almost out of order. What is unique in Pascal comes from himself; but more than all the others, he has the look of his time: the mixture of this singular quality and of a common character, general even to the point of being abstract, strikes the imagination. One is all the more surprised that the two elements are added to each other and are less combined.
One finds, first, in that face the violent curve one sees in so many men of that period. The forehead and the chin turn sharply in relation to the center of the face, like the two branches of a hyperbola. In the shape of the face, Pascal partakes at once of Descartes and of Conde. These faces are mirrors that ardently reflect the spectacle of life: they must see everything, and there is no face in which one better grasps the gift of imagining. But if Pascal has something of Descartes and of Conde in his features, he has neither the violent thrust of the latter, whose whole face seems launched like the beak of a bird of prey, nor the distrustful withdrawal of the former, who seems to retreat into shadow, like an owl, and to fix everything from that dark corner, like a bird of night. There is nothing more contradictory than Pascal’s mouth and the soul that passes through his eyes. Or rather, there is no face in which such contrary traits are gathered more curiously under a single aspect: the gaze of an infinite disdain and an infinite sadness.
A small portrait of Pascal, by Philippe de Champaigne, is placed beside the mask taken from the dead man. One can hardly doubt the one for its resemblance more than the other. Philippe de Champaigne draws and follows the features of his models with a rare fidelity; he puts conscience into it; and of a Jansenist like himself, one may say that exactitude in drawing is the practice of a virtue. Yet what painter is as faithful as death? Death paints from the depths; and its fidelity is the kind that hides nothing, that unveils the mystery, and that yields the secret kept until then, and which, without it, would not have been betrayed. Unforgettable image! Strange during life, Pascal’s face remains so in death. But then, it is beautiful. Death is Pascal’s place. He sought and pursued it everywhere so much that this passion troubles his living face. But when he has at last found it, and fears it no longer, having seen it face to face, what ineffable peace his ennui breathes. So that was all it was? — And what disdain!
To know whether Pascal died in Jesus Christ, one needs only that face: never had Pascal, from the day he was born, expressed such a depth of repose. He received the hand of death from the very hand of Jesus Christ; and, giving his hand to death, according to God’s order, he placed the other, with his soul and all his being, in the very hand of Jesus Christ. — Pascal living tells the perpetual expectation of that moment. And Pascal dead reveals its welcome; that the unique moment had calmed him forever; and that at last, in a sublime ennui of the world, a road is opened leading to a sublime repose, where hope as well as terror, where even disdain has peace forever.
Pascal measured many abysses, in himself and in other men. But he above all knew and practiced his own. That thick lip, which advances fleshy and red, disdained everything only at the command of an all-powerful thought. And that imperious command was cruel to it, without doubt. Perhaps it wished to escape it. Who will resist Pascal, if not Pascal himself? — But whom will Pascal fear, if not Pascal?
He knew his precipices; and he dreaded them profoundly, because their depth was known to him. Pascal knows well that all men would be in the same state if they could only suspect their abysses. But as they do not even see them, they do not measure them. Pascal suspects, sees, and measures. None went further in the knowledge of man. None therefore went further in the fear of man. And that is why Pascal never leaves Jesus Christ for a single instant. He needs Jesus Christ, or everything collapses, and he himself falls under the weight of contempt. You other men, who laugh and do not know, your precipices are in your eyes scarcely more than the common errors and miseries; you see yourselves in rivers where one barely loses one’s footing, and you need only a boat or to find the ford. You are drowned and cast in corruption on the bank before you have yet begun to fear that water. Pascal is made of another sort: he opens his eyes upon the immense ocean where he awakens, and sees himself floating there: infinity beneath his feet; infinity above his head; infinity on every side; an infinity of evil, of ignorance, of terror, and of pain. Pascal is not like you, to test an infinity with his foot and seek the ford of infinity. But Pascal on the contrary is certain that man is the animal sensitive to the infinity of darkness. There remains to him therefore only to cry for help. Were he weak like you, he would believe in his strength. But strong as he is, he measures his weakness. And he stands motionless, putting all his power solely into rising above that infinite water and stretching out his arms to the only rescue.
To ask whether Pascal doubts, one must doubt whether he lives. Whoever takes Jesus Christ from Pascal takes everything from him. Doubt for Pascal is death itself. To live, it is better to hold the wager one is sure of believing than to doubt that one does not believe. When doubt crosses him, as it does every man at his hour, Pascal dies. There is in him a certain cry that is a cry of death. And each time, Jesus Christ has raised him from the dead, drawing him from the tomb. Without Jesus Christ felt and experienced in the heart, Pascal’s life is an eternal agony. One cannot live in agony. Pascal, at least, could not yet do so.
“He distinguished our agony,” said M. de Seipse, coming at last out of the chapel, where he had seemed unable to tear himself from meditation upon that mask. “He foresaw its extremities and its horror. That is the reason he was, for his whole life, so faithful in his veneration of his father. M. Pascal the elder had nourished his son with so strong and so Christian a food that Pascal always found in it a reserve and the wherewithal to suffer the famine in the times when he might fear a dearth of faith. But he scarcely knew more than two such periods. In Pascal, the variations were only from common charity to perfect charity. Just as men do not know the danger they are in, they are ignorant of the sacrifice it demands. Pascal, knowing the peril, could never long consent to not doing all that must be done to escape it; I will tell you, moreover, that there is no half-truth or half-faith except in mediocre souls. It is the mediocrity of men that ensures the course of the world. And it would not go beyond the hour where we now stand, without the middle terms of this mediocrity that never end.
“All these procrastinations ensure duration for the poor hour of men. It passes; they pass with it; and ask no more. It suffices them not to see themselves pass. Few people live in the sight of that end where they must go. And those who glimpse it, as one does a cross atop a hillock between two roads in Brittany, turn their eyes from that path.
“Mediocrity, which preserves the world, is the same vanity that saves men. For all men live on vanity. If they did not have a thousand petty cares, they would have but a single one, which would kill them. That is why they avoid it: if not they themselves, then the wretched and magnificent instinct that binds them to what they are. They wish to live; and have no stronger reason for it, in truth, than that they wish it. Let us admire here again one of nature’s strokes, that tyrant who makes its own tyranny cherished and desired.
“Those who are mediocre in nothing, neither in heart nor in mind, soon turn to contemplate two abysses: the nothingness of the world and the nothingness of the self. Most great souls stop at one of the two precipices, which they fill by casting the other into it. And, to dissemble nothing, perhaps one cannot live without a heroic resolve. One must take the side of the world against oneself, or of oneself against the world. One cannot extricate oneself for less from that frightful space where the void reigns, and where it has all the dimensions of the mind, which are more than three. Hence those sublime resolutions: that of the saints, or of Tolstoy, who plays the good beast. However strong they are, they immolate themselves; they will believe in God or in this world, at any cost. And as the will for a perfect belief is already half a faith, soon they immolate themselves in it.
“They make desperate resolutions: whether of reason, or of the heart against it, but always desperate; for the highest step of both is that they despair. I do not know what a man is who is reduced to himself alone and does not despair. And yet one returns to oneself only after having left the world. One must therefore find, at whatever cost, some place in which to fix one’s soul and one’s life. Tolstoy does not doubt reason; he judges it naturally straight; he despises only its misuse; Tolstoy, in the end, believes much more in reason and in life than Pascal. And his Gospel is reasonable, which is the excess of unreason. Pascal would not adhere to it, because of that very reason to which Tolstoy resorts. He would judge it absurd, if not impious. Pascal has far more powerful attachments to the Self; and in the end it is always the heart he exalts and reason he humbles. Geometer though he was, he was only testing his strength in it; and all true power, all truth, he judges only in the heart. And yet this heart too is his enemy.
“He is rich in heart like no other: and his fear comes from that. This great heart overflows with a great self: Pascal would drain it at its source. That is what he aspires to. Pascal feels himself to be superb, full of love and hatred, equal to everything, superior to everything even. As great as he was, he knew himself greater still, in good and in evil, than others could know. That is why he wages an admirable war against himself. ‘If I had a heart as poor as my mind, I should be very happy,’ he sometimes cried. But he had one infinitely rich. You have not noticed the power of this heart.
”— I did not attend to it. Or rather, I did not distinguish it from the greatness proper to that unique man.
”— It is unique indeed. No one has sensed it, except perhaps his family to some degree, and M. de Sacy. One divines some fear mingled with the astonishment of that wise theologian, when Pascal reveals to him Epictetus and Montaigne. ‘M. de Sacy could not help showing M. Pascal that he was surprised at how he could turn things.’ In this world, where most are so poor in heart, who will understand the danger of knowing oneself too rich? All men who wish to sanctify themselves need hardly humble more than their minds, and put only their flesh in chains. Asceticism suffices; reason humbled in prayer, and the body reduced to the slave’s portion, one believes one has done enough. The triumph of that holiness is still for Pascal only a precarious victory. In my view, Pascal is nowhere so great as in the necessity, which he saw, of taming and stripping his heart. But the world has not known it, for it does not experience it.
“Yet for as long as there are great souls in this life, the asceticism of the heart will seem to them the only one necessary. It will not be so difficult to mortify the flesh and humble reason. One must trust every reason that is strong enough, every soul noble enough. They will be sufficiently disgusted with their impotence not to give themselves the food of vanity that it demands. But the greater the heart, the harder it will be to leave itself. For do not forget that it must leave everything in leaving itself.
“I am certain that there are men for whom the touch of a pointed hair shirt on the skin can be delicious; and others whom the very pride of a profound thought leads to trample it disdainfully underfoot: they will dare to exalt at its expense the disordered instinct of the brute. But this heart, avid to equal itself to the whole universe, avid even of all the most beautiful torments, it is not so easy to make it desert or to strip it bare. It is quite willing to give all its blood; but it wants to feel it flowing. It consents to let itself be torn; but on condition of enjoying the tearing. It lets itself be drained; it does not wish to dry up its springs itself. This dryness horrifies it. Tolstoy’s resolve is no less beautiful than Pascal’s: but it is not so rare. Tolstoy does not know so profound an abyss, and does not return from so far, despite the difference of the times. His nothingness is but one of the circles of the spiral in which Pascal’s infinite nothingness is described; and Pascal would never have filled his own with what fills Tolstoy’s. Tolstoy’s god is, after all, only a being of reason, and one that the heart summons to serve reason.
“One forces reason; one bends it to the service of the heart; for the heart itself willingly bends to serve; it often does more than half the way. Pascal, here, would still doubt, as those weak souls say. Once more, Pascal never doubts: he denies.
“Doubt is untenable for a great will. Doubt is a proof of strength only in the mind, and of the consummate weakness of character. The truly powerful man prefers to be wrong against doubt than to doubt without being wrong. He does not play with reason: he makes it sovereign, or he overwhelms it. He deliberately plays the beast, out of disgust with playing the man; and he can bring to it a height of pride and strength. He avenges himself upon the mind for the sufferings of the will.”
Already the day was fading and withdrawing from the chapel; I wished to see once more that mysterious face which breathes so deep a feeling of satiety, of serene peace, and of disdain. The plaster that has made it so pallid communicates to that face an eternal character. Over all the ennui of life, a captivating repose seems spread, the kind that nothing ever again disturbs, because nothing in man lends itself to it any longer. It is with a like glint that the sea shines languidly when the last circle of water closes over a sunken ship. No one, to my taste, has truly seen this mask. No more than a deep aspect of the sky or the sea is it easy to describe. It holds for eternity the passing breath of a superior soul. It shows, fixed in death, all the ennui of life: of that unspeakable sadness, death has made, here, a passion. Pascal’s features must have been in perpetual motion: the force of that mind and its disdainful will, always active and always restless during life, are fixed only there. In the sea of that passionate heart, death at last has cast anchor. A singular feature is that of the lowered eyelids, whose edges seem to half-open, and whose thickness surprises; this is because the wax placed there to protect the lashes from the burning of the plaster has fused with it, and the strange imprint has remained on the mask. So that boundless ennui, that perfect disdain in the serenity of repose, seem to smile. And nothing is more moving to the mind than this serene peace of Pascal in the hands of death: it contemplates the sweetness of salvation, in the bosom of the divine will, and smiles henceforth at its very contempt for life and all the miseries that torment that sick creature.
“What man in France,” thought M. de Seipse, “was ever the equal of that one? — He was the greatest; for he had the greatness of nearly all the others. He is at once the poet, the saint, and the scholar, the man who sees, the man who knows, the man who thinks; — much more: the man who has every sort of power, and who disdains them all at the price of the one he feels within himself. The force of his thought yields to no other; but he takes pleasure in humbling it. He is not sensitive to what it can do, but to what it cannot: he goes at once to its limits; he ordinarily stations himself where others only end by stopping. He has a far greater contempt than he will say for small minds and mediocre ones: but his disdain does not linger there, and prefers to go at a single stroke to the greatest. No doubt he scorns those who reason badly; but it is in order to make still less of those who pride themselves on reason. Science is the trial he makes of his strength; and he will not have anything assist it: not even a method: he abhors the mechanics of the mind as unworthy of his own. That is the secret of his resentment against Descartes: besides the fact that God revealed is not necessary to that system of the world, Descartes gives the mechanics of thought; he no longer obliges the geometer to the prodigious efforts of inquiry in the manner of the ancients; in Pascal’s view, he takes too much from the imagination. Pascal is like Archimedes, his hero in the order of geometry: he wants to owe all his discoveries to himself alone; he wants to contemplate figures and reduce them to number by the very force of reasoning; it does not please him that the symbol should come between the object of the problem and the geometric construction: Pascal was the first to cross the threshold of the calculus of the infinite, going by his own paths, with the same step an ancient might have taken, without taking the easy roads where Newton and Leibniz met. And what he does in geometry, it seems to me I see him do in morals as in everything else.
“No man loved difficult tasks more than he. He attempts them all with passion. He wants to be a saint because he does not believe himself capable of it. He wants to be a saint, as much by all that he feels within him of powers suited to it, as by all that he knows in himself of powers contrary to holiness. He therefore measures his heart against the most difficult tasks; and his greatness of soul perhaps esteemed them only in proportion to their difficulty.
“The means that abridge, and those that aid the mind, repel him no less than those that claim to lend a shoulder to life. For so strong a soul, nothing is worthy of it that does not exercise it; and what does not cost much has little value for so rare a taste. At a certain degree, neither the heart nor reason is satisfied with anything that is not perfect. He who is enamored of perfection has but one will — which is to attain it, and which everything thwarts. Incessantly his very life is at stake, and nothing less. No effort keeps him at what he has. He is entirely in what he seeks. For the passionate heart, the displeasure of living increases infinitely more by faith than by doubt. That is why the passionate seldom doubt: they naturally prefer their sad ardor to a temperate joy. In their eyes, no good is true but the sovereign good. Easy morality is the death of morality, and they detest it. There is no duty so easy that most of the time the contrary is not far easier still. Everything that is easy is according to nature; and nature is full of crimes. — What, crimes? — Yes: and more, of easy crimes.
“Nothing therefore was too difficult for Pascal; for he set himself truth and perfection themselves, the unique good, God Himself. He loves and desires only God; but he sees all nature in revolt against Him. Man does not fail to take part. Man is the prince of rebels who must lay down his arms and repent of his rebellion. Whatever one may think of the rest, the idea of his rebellion is in man the beginning of conscience, if not of wisdom: it is by that that he begins to undo the knot of the Self.
“Had he not had so many secret passions, Pascal would not have crushed them all. But he had discovered them, and he gave them no rest. He alone knew the terrible rebel he had to vanquish. He never deemed him sufficiently vanquished. He loved to tame nature, as Alexander loved to conquer. Each of us, if strong enough, takes ever more pleasure in his victories: and if they are harsh, painful, won over oneself, no matter; so much are we, despite all, attached to our own strength that we would rather exercise it against ourselves than not exercise it at all. It is also a joy to put it in chains and to keep it there. One feels it then, and its cruel leaps or its sighs in chains.
“Often nature in fetters pleases the one who detests it free; it appears more beautiful, like man in the bonds of death. Enslaved, it is no longer hateful. All the dead have the beauty of what is accomplished. The frozen face of an enemy on the ground, even amid disgust, arouses pity.
“Pascal regarded the passions as enemies that have not been sufficiently laid low unless they are dead. They pleased him strangely, perhaps, when he touched them with the whip and the pincers, or turned them on the rack.
“His charity toward men is of the same kind. He knows them too well to believe in their natural goodness. That is merely a bait by which the wickedness of some lures the wickedness of others. He sees their natural perversity, which drives them to evil, and their softness in turning from it. He therefore pursues them all in himself and shuts them in their lair of sins.
“The first act of a full and free soul is not to succumb to the humiliation of its crimes any more than to love them. But it is to know them; and, known, without loving them, without even hating them, to hold them for facts. They are enslaved as soon as they are put in their place. Evil is most often an effect of weakness, a usurpation of the bad part over the good, which is the weaker, but which exists no less for that. It is the point of view of a God, the one from which everything is in its rank and according to its order: there, the worst has a kind of place at the feet of the excellent — and even a kind of right. Human judgments are so mediocre and even so unjust only because they never have regard for the good in evil, nor for the evil in good. In the hypocrisy of morals, there is more involuntary blindness than one thinks: the view is limited; it does not wish to go beyond those limits; and error of judgment follows.”
The keeper closed the doors of the chapel behind us. The lilacs swayed with the same grace along the wall. The slanting light lent a new soul to the countryside. Melancholy spoke louder in the silence, with that voice so dear to hearts that are sad to live, which renders bitterness sweeter to them, in return for the slightly bitter savor it mingles with all sweetness. We walked amid ruins that no longer even have the look of disorder.
“I lose heart,” said M. de Seipse, “when I see death itself dressed up new, and destruction aping life. It would surely have been better to hide all the remains of Port-Royal, the portraits and manuscripts of the solitaries, in a vault dug beneath the ground, than to raise a church for them. Today they rake the paths of death to do honor to strollers; and they commit gardeners to the rubble. You know the dreadful luxury of cemeteries. I love ruins where the insolence of nature is added: each negates the other. Pascal would not have wished for this posthumous glory. It sufficed that Port-Royal be seen in dust, and what nature left to itself amounts to. What indeed are the remains of a great mind? He exists whole only in himself — I mean in us. Sumptuous tombs are needed for kings, for court poets, for pensioned philosophers, for horses promoted to consul by Caligula, and even for Nicole and men of letters. But there are men who are repelled by such pomp. For them, all tombs are too small. They are the shame of what they claim to contain; and they grant a great triumph to what they do contain: for it is nothing.
”— Mud and worms,” I said. “And not even that, after a little time, when the hundredth grass has dried upon the mound, separated from the first only by a hundred others that dry a hundred times.”
M. de Seipse inquired whether foreigners visit Port-Royal; and he learned with pleasure from the keeper that foreigners do not come here. “The good fortune is rare,” I said. “They cannot understand Pascal. How could they ever know that this man, if he thought more gravely than all the others in his time, always added the beauty of form to that of thought? They cannot be sensitive to it; they will see the force of thought, and wrong it of art, barbarously.
”— Foreigners, you say?” replied M. de Seipse. “However, men of letters have been coming here of late; and they inflict upon Pascal the public incense of their admiration. Thanks to heaven, it is still only every hundred years; and see what they leave behind: caricatures cast in bronze; a parody that flatters itself it will be eternal. An image of our times, in truth.
”— No doubt they come to encourage themselves toward death by contemplating so great a past that is no more.
”— You jest,” said he. “They are not envious of death, those who live. The curiosity of death chills all life. Especially a life so poor. Those people want first of all a good dinner. They make a turn at Port-Royal to whet their appetite.”
I excused myself for having jested.
”— I came to see Pascal in the places where his great soul had found a horizon it did not pass.
”— Let us not doubt it: it had chosen it. It had fixed itself there in the sight of what endures, and to escape what passes. One would like to know how all that sand dissipates: one knows well that it is only sand. Life is a sad dream.
”— And so one loves the corner of earth where one dreams as one pleases.
”— Say rather that one seizes it, and subjugates it. We are all the same: we need slaves; that is what we call love. When all seems subject to change, places, to show that this too is only an appearance, do not change. And if men had a keener taste for eternal things, they would take care not to touch those where a unique memory attaches, which will always be alone, there where it is, and which will not be replaced.”
We saw a fine tree, standing alone, which bears the name of Pascal: the walnut tree where Pascal came to sit. And if it is not the one, it must be so; for if it is not, what do I care for that tree? But I believe I see there that man, terrible in thought, overwhelming his very thought with contempt and seeking for his repose the help that is not denied to innocent leaves. For they are born without pain at the appointed time and fall without anguish in autumn. M. de Seipse then spoke to me of Pascal’s sadness: it is an effect of his ardor and his gravity.
“Several who admire him most, and make almost a profession of it, distinguish among the various objects he offers to their admiration. They approve him for his conclusion and his faith, but do not accept the path nor the premises against reason. Or else they praise him for being so bold in doubting, and make light of what he believes in comparison with his doubt. But Pascal neither believes nor doubts as they imagine, by separate parts. Pascal’s doubt is a gaze of faith, and his faith has all manner of ties to his doubt. It is remarkable that no one has spoken of Pascal more poorly, or with more praise, than a philosopher and a geometer by profession. They were, in truth, men of the trade, both of them, and they owed it to him to praise him without having understood him.
“A certain grand master of philosophy, who is not far either from being a dancing and deportment master, is indignant at the poor account Pascal makes of philosophy. He finds him very little reserved with the depths of things. He judges him extreme in his faith and extreme in his doubt. He blames him for his disdain of philosophers and scolds him for the somber violence of his religion. After which, one hardly knows what he accepts of him: and Pascal would perhaps say with bitterness that it is the author and the professional wit. But Pascal is assuredly Pascal only in order not to content himself with the religion or the philosophy of M. Cousin — if indeed there is anything that answers to that word. And more, to say everything, Pascal is Pascal only in order not to content himself with the posts and ribbons that one finds in this world. M. Cousin reproves him for the saying that ‘philosophy is not worth an hour of trouble,’ and for Pascal’s not pardoning Descartes: this, he believes, is to misjudge the great man of the Method, and to fail to recognize him. It is, on the contrary, to know him better than he was ever known by anyone, or by himself perhaps. And M. Cousin may think of it what he will: Pascal knows his Descartes and his philosophy better than he.
“If the Gospel is the truth, it is not an easy career where one strolls, giving and taking with both hands. Jesus Christ did not die on the cross for the comfort of the Christian, but for his exercise on earth. And reason is not the proud enemy that one brings down by flattering it, nor the one to whom one surrenders in order to conquer it. Pascal’s faith is not a good woman of all work, who cleans the living man’s room and prepares him a soft bed in paradise: it makes itself served and does not serve. In the same manner, austere with austerity, Pascal is contemptuous and harsh toward what he truly despises and detests. The word he has about Descartes is the most profound, and says everything: ‘He would gladly, in all his philosophy, have been able to do without God; but he could not help granting Him a flick to set the world in motion; after that, he has no more use for God.’ It paints the whole power of Descartes, who constructs his mechanics of the universe and would have dispensed with the flick if he could. It is even doubtful whether, at bottom, he does not dispense with it and himself sets the machine going, or does not animate it from all eternity. All that the power of Descartes places in reason, Pascal refuses him. And the little that Descartes reserves to God is the very nothing into which Pascal plunges man and the world. Pascal does not doubt; he ruins the object of doubt. Pascal affirms unceasingly, and with unsurpassed force: it is for or against, but always affirmed.
“Between the two, he does not hold himself: in his eyes, there is only life there — that is to say, there is nothing. He would have felt only extreme contempt for a kind of philosophical religion that is neither religious nor philosophical: he denies philosophy.
“He who denies philosophy, one cannot say of him that he falls into the doubt of philosophers. If I deny that I owe you anything, I am not doubting, as far as I know, whether I owe you something. But, on the contrary, I confound you together, you and that supposed debt. Not only do I not have it — I forbid you to believe I have it. So sure am I of not having it, and so true is it! There is crime in recalling it still, if you persist. There is crime in philosophy’s claiming to lead man and in flattering itself that it knows anything. For, besides knowing nothing, it knows that it cannot know. And Pascal spends his time proving it.
“Philosophy is not even the science of geometers, which, at least, exercises the force of the mind and tests it, if not employs it. On the contrary, philosophy is entirely without an object; and, as it insolently assigns itself the greatest of all, which is indeed the only one, it deserves only contempt, or, very nearly, hatred. It is hateful in that it deceives on the one matter where it is everything, for man, not to be deceived — and feigns not to know it.
“What does all philosophy prove, and of what is it certain concerning life and death, the universe and man? That is the question; and as the answer must be that it has not the slightest certainty, it is just to conclude that all philosophy is not worth an hour of trouble.
“This is not doubting — it is denying. And, for my part, wherever Pascal is not in God Himself, he does not doubt: he denies.
“Pascal needs a certainty. And I need one as he does. For want of what is certain, I see not doubt but the void. What is not — is not. I do not call it what might be. I prefer a horrible certainty, made of abysses and negations, to your half-truths, all made of contrary affirmations that destroy each other and are only shameful doubts, or so mediocre they do not even know themselves to be doubtful.
“Pascal penitent and extreme, who denies in the exact measure in which he affirms, violent against doubt, passionate for faith — it is he alone who is true, reasonable, and prudent; and not you, who tack between nothing and everything, who therefore do not know what everything or nothing is, and who lose everything in order to lose nothing.
“You tremble to know yourselves; and perhaps not without reason. That is why you live by half-measures. As though there were a middle term between being and not being; as though a half-life, a half-death, a half-truth could have the least meaning! Were there no truth, we are certainly obliged to act as though there were one, and with all evidence. And as though you did not show that you yourselves are but half-nothings, for this infinite mediocrity to suffice you?
“It takes a little more for Pascal: nothing less than this full truth. And first, without certainty, he cannot live. The man who lives in uncertainty seems absurd to him, and a deceiving prodigy if he is content with it. The state in which he finds Montaigne fills him with astonishment and makes him afraid. He sees the force of that mind well enough; but he suspects the weakness of that heart; and the sight of this contrast inclines him to contempt. Then, a too great soul is sometimes heavy to bear: at certain encounters, it seems to me that Pascal crushes Montaigne because perhaps he envies him. These are his moments of hidden weakness and his sighs toward life.
“In the end, there is nothing between nothingness and God — between the one faith and the other: nothing where one can stand, no place for man or for life. Without faith, one cannot live; and it is in Pascal that one experiences it best, as in the most powerful soul and the one most concerned with infinity that ever was. Faith is truth felt by the heart and living for it. Pascal finds it and can conceive it only in Jesus Christ: it is Jesus Christ who is the proof of God; it is not God who proves Jesus Christ; God serves all ends: let Him be, if one will, the name of truth felt by the heart; — this truth might not be the same, in its form, for all men. The world contains more than one language. But felt by the heart, it is perfect; it is unique; by that it suffices: it ruins the Self and imprisons it in all the rest: nothing more is needed.
“I say nothing of the object of faith; the object matters much less than faith itself. The essential is that you do without faith, and that you think of it at last. Without faith, which compels the heart, one must lose life or reason: one cannot confine them to the prison of carnal corruption. It is unbearable to see this crowd of men accustom themselves to being nothing but a little flesh rotting on the vine: I mean it equally of the heartless devout and the soulless atheists; they differ no more than they resemble each other. What is there where faith is not? — Crumbs of self, under the table of life. Between the faith that denies and the faith that affirms, for strong souls there is no middle ground. Between God and nothingness, it is an immense abyss, whose bottom is single and which offers, at long intervals, opposite edges at various levels: either one goes to the bottom, or one holds to one of these points. Only null souls can float in the intermediate void; and however light these feathers may be, they end by snagging on the edges, or else by falling. Montaigne, who is so lively, wanders on every side and has his place as well: for Montaigne is far more stoical than one thinks.
“Pascal, who knows the nothingness of all philosophy, gives that name to this abyss. And, unable to live without a perfect faith, he gives himself wholly to God. But being so, he is so only through Jesus Christ. Pascal’s faith is Jesus Christ felt by the heart. ‘Not only do we know God only through Jesus Christ, but we know ourselves only through Jesus Christ. We know life, death only through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what our life is, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.’
“‘Apart from Him, there is only vice, misery, errors, darkness, death, despair.’
“‘Without Jesus Christ, the world would not subsist; for it would need either to be destroyed, or to be like a hell.’”
M. de Seipse repeated these words slowly, as though traversing their precipices. And I could not help saying to him: “So, there is the end of your philosophy? I see better now whence comes the desperate melancholy that drives you.
”— It is not a philosophy; that is beyond doubt; it is a very somber faith. I breathe an infinite pain.
”— This world would have to be like a hell, or be destroyed?
”— Yes, monsieur. I am Pascal without Jesus Christ. I lack the miracles. They might have failed him too, today. I envy him for being dead.
”— There are false ones and true ones, he said.
”— But he does not say there are none. It is easier for him to lend faith to the miracles of impostors than to refuse it to the true ones; and in order not to doubt the latter, he even believes in the miracles of charlatans. ‘Having considered,’ he says, ‘whence it comes that one lends so much credence to so many impostors who say they have remedies, even to the point of often putting one’s life in their hands, it seemed to me that the true cause is that there are genuine ones.’ To conclude at last, he thinks that one naturally believes in miracles. Yet the mind doubts them naturally; and reason, by nature, does not believe in them.
”— Well, leave reason then, since its end is absurd.
”— It is not that I do not wish to leave it: it is reason that will not leave me.”
We took a few steps in the Solitude: that is the beautiful name of a beautiful place, under the trees. At the top of an elm, a bird was wearing itself out singing.
”— That sparrow has happiness,” I said.
”— Until a kite strikes it on the skull and eats its brain.
”— What does it matter, if it does not foresee it?
”— One does not know,” said M. de Seipse.
”— Man alone is not happy.
”— It is because he knows one cannot be.
”— No: it is perhaps that he deprives himself of happiness.
”— Where is the difference? Whether happiness is taken from him or he takes it from himself, he does not have it. But there is more: man has understood that he has no right to it.”
We had sat down on a mound, at the foot of a black cross, set up at the end of a shadowy retreat reached by a few earthen steps, a kind of rustic oratory. Pascal perhaps prayed there. He must have loved prayer passionately: all the powers of love are drawn to it, when all other ways are closed to them. M. de Seipse resumed: “Do you think one can ever be happy when one’s eyes are open upon life? You yourself do not believe it. We dream; and when we open our eyes, we are afraid.”
”— Children dream more than we do and are happy.
”— No doubt: children do not know they dream. The consciousness of the evil one suffers ruins the good one might have. Pascal is very wise: the mere idea of happiness seems utterly absurd to him. He knows what it is worth, under the rule of death. I desire and I die. I will like a God, and the whole universe crushes me like a worm; and without the whole world being needed, another worm, a bacillus, an infinitely small one, any one at all, among myriads that swarm. Every view upon the infinite is a ray of strange light in the midst of innumerable darkness. It runs, come from no one knows where, between two banks of dismal eternities, blacker than the bottom of the seas or the dregs of delirium. The abyss is at the edge of every deep view: the kind proposed by an imagination avid for its object, to the point of ardently losing itself in it. And this view, at the edge of the abyss, produces vertigo. One or two men, every hundred years, go through life with eyes fixed on this vision, pilgrims of the abyss, very sorrowful travelers of the infinite.
”— One commonly accepts what one cannot avoid; one even ends by finding it agreeable; one thinks little, or not at all. And that is all there is to say: so it is forever. That is Pascal’s word about corpses. Through sheer emptiness, one is not sensitive to the void. That is the advantage of vanity. Men are quite content to be vain. What would they do if they thought?
”— They would not live, no doubt. There are three sorts of minds: those who see necessity and accept it; those who endure it and do not see it; and those who, seeing it, do not accept it. The first are the wisest; the last, the most clear-sighted. For those who most willingly accept what they see of the world are not so sure of seeing it, although they believe they do. Those who see nothing, and do not resist, are the happiest, and little different from beasts and children. So it is worthless to be a man: for the more one lives, the less one accepts. One excuses oneself well enough for accepting what one does not understand — and always better than for not understanding it. Being what he is, Pascal finds it sweet to reduce himself to the state of a child: for how much effort is needed! But the heart is never stripped enough; and for a child, he never sees enough innocence.
”— What a strange image, however, of a Pascal who practices childhood.
”— It seems so to us: for we do not have, like him, a perfectly good and complete reason for doing what he does. He wants to be a child, because he does not know himself to be without a father. But, on the contrary, he runs to a divine father who opens his arms to him. The sweetness is unparalleled of having a father; if he is as tender as he is powerful, what salvation and what refuge are his arms? Who would not wish for such a childhood, welcomed by such a fatherhood? The great difference between Pascal and all others is that Jesus Christ is everything to him, and all the rest is nothing. Your Tolstoy loves reasons and facts so much that the person of God barely concerns him. He loves the Gospel so much that he does without Jesus Christ. But for Pascal, if there is not a God in the Gospel, the Gospel seems to him almost as empty as all the rest. Pascal is all man and all passion; he knows only passion and man. He needs a man in his God, and a God in his man. He knows the wounds. He listens to the agony. He gathers the flowing blood. He drinks the last words and the final breath. He is intoxicated by them. All light he receives from divine eyes. He speaks to the wounds that speak to him. In the bosom of death, he speaks to life, which answers him by life, and alone can do so. He does not know what salvation is without the Savior. And I know it no more than he.
“What would he have been, this great Pascal, had he not been a Christian? He would never have made an atheist. He had too much material; and he had measured that, if it takes a little to cut out an atheist, it does not take much to drape him.
“Every powerful soul needs a God. Had he not had Jesus Christ, in the powerlessness of having any other, he would have fallen into some infinite despair. He had not the cold soul of a Spinoza, a perfect and glacial reason. He was far too great to be self-sufficient, as those small ones do. Self-satisfaction marks strength, but only up to a point.
“For Pascal to bear life, it was necessary that he believe. He had the liveliest faith. And the proof is that it was sad. Only the simple in spirit are joyful: that reward is theirs. A great soul that believes is always sad. For it is in the world like Columbus returning from America: and it thinks the world is small.
“The soft pillow that Montaigne speaks of has much sweetness indeed: it is good for well-made heads, made in the common mold. But there is no rest on that down for singular heads. There are some who cannot sleep on feathers.
”— On all sides,” I observed, “they are then accused of sickness.
”— That is the vulgar opinion, which has, moreover, its truth. All of us are sick and declining. The sickness is mortal, as the saying goes: and the outcome is certain. The happiest do not know their sickness, or bear it laughing. A little health changes the whole view of things. But those whose soul is uncommon pay for that sickness with their health. They are sick forever. Do they not renounce joy? And yet they are sometimes rich in it, and there are some among them who love it. But they will no longer believe in it! The resolutions of the will are the finest of all. They are those of the intelligence that has penetrated the abyss of the heart. And the beauty of the ascetic soul is there.”
Asceticism of the Heart
The asceticism of the heart is the rarest triumph of the soul. It is the exercise of predilection for souls that have no equals. It is the great temptation of the holiest, who envy it when they know of it but cannot attain it, for very few succeed. Cold souls cannot even understand what this asceticism consists of. And it requires first of all, indeed, burning passions, a fire that folds back upon itself, that hides itself and devours itself.
I have known men enamored of penitence who would have wished to have two bodies to make suffer, to work their flesh with a double suffering. I have seen others, tempted by the zeal of charity, who would have created the sick in this world to care for them, the guilty to save them, and the lepers to tend them. But this is still only a charity without passion. However holy it may be, it has every sort of limit; it is even base at times; for there are degrees in holiness itself. Each is holy in his own way, when he is; or rather, each who can be so can be so in only one way, which is his own. One must ask nothing of anyone but to go his way to the end; and if it is two steps, it is because one has not the means for a longer march. It is admirable that all equality is vain, unless before the single thought that levels everything, by measuring everything against its own nothingness.
The most beautiful and most difficult road to perfection, where almost no one goes, is the one the heart opens, in asceticism, to passion. And nothing is so little known, for nothing is so rare. Passion, rare in all things, is far rarer still when it persecutes itself to multiply its forces tenfold, and exercises them solely in order to put their doubled power in the service of a perfect love. This fire of passion, it therefore feeds to maintain the flame of a lamp hidden from the sight of most men, where all egoism, incessantly renewed at its source, burns only to consume itself. An almost divine end is this: to persevere in oneself beyond all measure, in order to immolate oneself.
The saints, in truth, must be tempted by it; and if they are not seduced, it is because prudence holds them at the edge of this abyss where pride dwells. Then, they have not within them enough of that surprising force to have enough intelligence of it. It attracts them by its mystery, and frightens them, like seduction. Pascal is the man of this almost divine end. He does not wish to be ranked among the saints. His greatness, full of a superb humility, confesses itself most unworthy. Oh, how I see him aim higher! And by what he sees, himself, at the bottom of his heart, as no other man has seen there, this great Christian fills with bitterness; and he trembles.
The asceticism of the heart is the exercise of the man who directs his passion to the end of the infinite, and to that end alone. Of the infinite, he makes his sole object, to which all that passion applies, at every moment. There, a summit of passion ceaselessly strips itself of passion for all things and for itself, impassioned for a single beauty and a single truth, one or the other being perfection.
Cold hearts have no trouble detaching themselves. Many saints could do nothing better than be saints, no doubt; but more than one, perhaps, could not have done otherwise. Charity can be the last resort of a dry and slow soul, which reason persuades to the fine resolve of being moved. The imitation of God, or a determined zeal for duty, opens an unhoped-for life to men who are honest by nature but whose virtue, until then, has no horizon and, so to speak, no hope. Sometimes they are such that they wrong virtue itself with their virtue. More than one cold sectarian is unaware that the reason he has is less fruitful than the wrongs it targets and combats. There is, in the virtue that goes about the world, much straw and only the appearance of the ear; for want of heart, the ear is empty; the harvest looks fine, and on the threshing floor one gathers scarcely a little grain. How many gentle people without gentleness, and how much softness or coldness that passes for goodness? Most often, goodness is made only of the absence of evil, as the peace among men results not from their horror of war but from their cowardice in waging it.
The asceticism of the heart is therefore a struggle and a continual victory. The greatest force exercises itself there to conquer ceaselessly, in order to triumph ceaselessly over itself. This is how Pascal is. His image alone tells of this perpetual combat in unforgettable strokes. The extreme sadness of that face without gauntness, the profound attention of that gaze, bent inward, do not speak of a soul naturally holy. All the power of that soul is hidden. The man’s forehead flees from what that gaze dreams within itself, so much has it taken it to itself; and all that that mouth, at once so avid and so disdainful, advances to taste, the chin denies and swallows back.
There was not, I know, a man more passionate than that one. Because of his passion, he is sick. Because of it, he loves, he calls, he awaits Jesus Christ as no one else could; not merely as a faithful follower; not merely as a prostrate son who hopes or fears or runs to meet his father; but as one who shares in the wounds himself. He feels them as soon as he thinks them. The ecstasies of the greatest saints are not more humble than his, and some are more amorous. But their humility owes more to weakness than Pascal’s, which he draws from his strength. Their love is that of a creature; and Pascal’s love is, in some sense, that of a companion and a hero suffering at the side of his master. Sublime familiarity, in agony, in blood, in the human anguish in which the death of a God is wholly steeped. Familiarity in what is most august and most strong, where passion has made itself so grave that it falls, with all the infinite weight with which it has charged itself, upon the heart of death, and of a divine death. In such a soul, such a grief is alone eternally present, in its mystery. And in the end, it alone is enviable.
Nothing less is needed to draw out of himself a man so far above other men. Here are the delights to which all others together do not compare, for perhaps in them they are annihilated. It is to savor these alone that Pascal destines himself. He directs all the fire of his heart upon this focus. He is burning even when he appears to be ice. No one has known or approached him without loving or hating him. Lukewarm in nothing, he found no lukewarm souls. His father wept for joy, from the beginning, at the sight of the son he had given himself. Pascal set all the women of his family in holiness. He frightens M. de Sacy, and does not frighten his servant; but, on the contrary, superb despite all, and secretly superb, which makes him doubly so, he is simple with her; he can be humble with that good woman without thinking of his humility, an idea that would ruin it. That is why Pascal lives alone and withdraws to a room with a beggar and poor people. He does not even want a cell in a cloister or a family dwelling: he knows well that he cannot touch life without embracing it with a powerful grip; and that to live, for a man of his sort, is always to dominate. He warns his sister and his father of the danger of loving him too much; and the more he uses cold terms, the more I feel him defending himself against too much love. Or perhaps he is too great to defend himself against it: he takes the flood of that passion, he hastens and swells it; but he diverts it to what is no longer anything belonging to the self. He speaks against worldly attachments, not as a man who strips himself bare, but as a secret miser, hoarding an incalculable treasure of an unknown kind. The ascetic who is so only according to the flesh, however exhausted with fatigue and pain he may be, has the expression of joy; he is tranquil, like everything that strips itself of passion; and if he sings the praises of his victory, the words may in vain be the warmest: they come from a cold mouth. It is indeed necessary that this be so: a sanctified body mortifies itself enough to make a comfortable bed for a holy soul. But Pascal pronounces glacial sentences with burning tongue and lips.
The feverish Pascal gives his cold life to this world, which he does not wish to love; he reserves the embers of his soul for the sole hidden love that is so worthy of being loved and where even perfect grief is lovable. Such is the asceticism of the heart: it does not ruin its passions in a spirit of charity. It is nothing but passion for that charity. It is so strong that it claims the whole man, without retrenching anything, in order to consecrate itself, in all its strength, to what deserves it all, and increased rather than diminished.
The state of struggle could go no further. Pascal sits in it, with a masterful will, like the confessor of the faith at the place of his martyrdom. Pascal evades nothing. He does not deign to. That is what it is good for, to be a true geometer even in holiness. He prefers to push the rigor of combat to excess. Infinite difficulty is the supreme seduction for a heart of infinite force. Pascal’s passion wages war upon his passion, as upon the only enemy worthy of it, and furnishes it arms.
Pascal lives in fever, in trembling, and in the sad delights of this heart he feeds and devours.
Pascal, sick in his room, is one of the greatest spectacles of man. He has a beggar placed beside him, sick like himself. At other times, a poor man; and first of all, I am sure, a man, whoever he may be, is always a sick man. He who suffers in his body is only twice so. But the original sickness, mortal from the beginning, who cures it? — Life itself.
In the period before he had broken with the world, Pascal’s friend must have been his patient. I imagine it was Miton, and above all because Miton must have seen Pascal as his patient. Pascal never left Miton: he had taken him into himself; he was not troubled by him, as people say: Miton is an atheist and does not doubt; he is a fairly good mind. But the better it is, the more Pascal makes it his target. It is proud of its reason: it must be so: otherwise, what profit in bringing it down?
Will this powerful Pascal go and humble an enfeebled thought? You judge only by yourselves and your comforts. Pascal increases his enemy in order to overwhelm him. He waits until his toothache is so bad that he discovers the cycloid; and, moreover, he proposes the problem to all of Europe, with the undeniable design of humbling everyone. Besides being a Jesuit, Father Lalouvere learns what it costs to try to evade this humiliation. But where one sees only the pride, or even the bad faith of Pascal, I recognize his superb humility. No more than to doubt does he leave any room in himself for contradiction. He does not despise geometry in himself, but in the geometers: for they are only geometers. And of small geometry. To the end of his life, he wishes, on the contrary, to carry the geometric spirit to the height of its power. He owes to an incredible effort of pure geometry the very foundations of the calculus of the infinite. He therefore does not despise geometry: he abases it. What use is it to abase what is not very high? — He always honors Fermat; and if he bears a grudge against Descartes, it is in part because Descartes’ mathematics does not exercise the mind enough. The greatness of the mind is dear to him: but he measures it.
Solitude is the place of pride and humility alike. It is equally proper to both. The great soul humbles its pride in secret: it is an armor one wears in the world and from which one frees oneself. But one brings pride even to stripping off pride. That is why the four walls of a room where one is alone are the space needed for this discipline. One does not stop at the first layer; and no modesty prevents from removing everything. And in the end one is a great saint sooner than a good self-knower. Children and simple folk could say they do not fear goodness, neither others’ nor their own. But Pascal will always say to himself: “I fear my very goodness, because I know it.”
The sight of that room where Pascal has withdrawn moves the depths of my soul. Pascal makes his bed and serves himself: this thought pleases me, that in what others could do for him, he replaces them — he whom no man in the world could then have replaced in what he did. That is where true greatness is known. But he is far greater in the love to which his passion is consecrated than in forcing his heart to forget itself.
It seems to me he esteems himself with grief and ceases to love himself, the more he loves men and ceases to esteem them. The charity in which he exercises his heart is a passionate search for the sole love. It is therefore true, and one experiences it at every hour, once the first has come, this sentiment so bold and sad: that the passionate love of God implies a love of men that can go even to entire sacrifice — but disdainful of itself and still more of them.
Pascal maintains a familiar commerce with the sepulcher. Here again is what the solitude of a room is good for. This intimacy with the fever of death has nothing at all of the coldness of a devout practice; still less has it the lifeless views in which spiritless minds take pleasure, and many philosophers. Pascal’s conversation with death is not an idle one; for the sepulcher, to which Pascal ceaselessly inclines his ear, is not empty. Pascal, on the contrary, sees there the whole universe lying, which it contains, and when he speaks, he awaits the reply of an eternal voice.
So Pascal can disdain everything; and, if need be, submit to everything. For where is the tyrant, the chain, the torment itself, however submissive he may seem, from which his soul does not in truth escape?
Pascal scarcely leaves his room now except to go to Port-Royal or to church. And when he is in the street, he lives in the same way between the four walls of solitude, as at the moment when one finds him seated there.
It is this Pascal of the solitude whom I see speaking, one winter evening, to a girl from the country, having found her in the square, wandering, young and beautiful, alone, in rags, almost lost like a child. He cannot see her without thinking with equal ardor of her ruin, where she already has one foot, and of the salvation to which he wishes to lead her. The seduction of innocence is unparalleled for minds that know its fragile kind. He takes her with him; he places her in the hands of a priest; he sees to her food and clothing; at last he is sure of having snatched her from the abyss of the flesh, where she was bound to fall. As long as he lives, this deed remains hidden. But when he is dead, it is published; and it remains no less veiled in the eyes of his friends and his sister who admire him. They see it in him only as it would have been in another: and yet, however holy that other man might have been, he could not be Pascal, nor wise in his fashion. It is neither from cold piety, detached from the creature even when it attaches itself most to its object, that Pascal acts that evening. Nor is it from charity for that girl: lost, she would perhaps have tasted pleasures that fled when she was saved; she would perhaps have preferred them to what they cost; and in the end, if she had had the choice between the two happinesses, the happiness of ruin would have made her happier, no doubt by her own admission. For this world is full of shades who wish for only a little wind, provided it blows toward the shores where they want to be carried. The wise clergyman who praises Pascal’s virtue in this connection does not judge it as Pascal himself would have. The man who measured to a line’s precision the nose on which the empire of the world depends does not deceive himself about the value of a little girl. If he saves her, it is far less for her sake than for the passionate love of God, to which the asceticism of the heart inclines him. This love does not go without hatred of nature. Pascal, who takes this girl by the hand, cares nothing for an ounce of her flesh, more or less. But he burns with zeal for another cause, one that is worth the trouble: what he does is to conquer and bend nature. His delight is to thwart it. He wants it to have the worse of it; and this terrible beast, this monster all appetite, insatiable, must be starved if one dreams of subduing it; there is a struggle worthy of a man. There is an enemy for Pascal.
It is said of many men that they are worth more than what they do. And it is the contrary that must be said, and which is true. For that opinion flatters them, as does the whole force of their lies. Nearly all men are worth even less than the little they do; and the proof is good, from the great trouble they have in doing it. Pascal is of the small number in whom the man infinitely surpasses his actions. Pascal’s book is the most beautiful there is in France. And yet it contains nothing that equals the life that Pascal’s sister wrote of him in a few pages.
That woman, of so solid a mind, of so firm and sturdy a virtue, could not, however, know her brother well enough: but it sufficed that she had the model before her eyes and that she retained its features, to give the idea of that incomparable greatness: a man whom nature created for her triumph, and who lives only to triumph over nature.
At last, this God who must be conquered, Pascal touches his conquest. At last Pascal is upon his deathbed. At last, here he is like a child: for he is dying. The time has come: the highest effort of that mind has brought him to have the happiness of perfect innocence: which is, for man, not to be.
And yet that powerful soul, which believes itself wholly God’s, is still embattled. One would say it does not want its victory. It wages a terrible combat against the flesh. An entire day passes in agony. In the end, it receives its reward. Avid as it is for all permanence, its greatness is fixed: it is no more.
3 May 1899.