Pascal, BLAISE, one of the best writers and profoundest thinkers France has produced, was born of a good legal family, at Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne, 19th June 1623. His father, Étienne Pascal, was a president of the Court of Aids there, and was himself a man of high character and capacity; his two surviving sisters, Gilberte and Jacqueline, grew up beautiful and accomplished women, with something of their brother's intellect and all his spiritual elevation of character. The elder of the two, Gilberte (born 1620), married her cousin M. Périer in 1641, penned a tender and touching sketch of her brother's life, as well as her sister's, and had her own history written by her gifted and austere daughter Marguerite (1646–1733). Jacqueline (born 1625) wrote verses as a child, and in maturer life remarkable letters and Thoughts on the 'Mystery of the Death of Christ.' After a troubled spiritual experience she became one of the sisters of Port Royal in 1652, but failed to find all the happiness she sought for, and died nine years later, immediately after having been persuaded into subscribing against her conscience the formulary required from the Port-Royalists, which she had vehemently resisted as a treasonable betrayal of the cause. Her brother, at first willing to submit, now offered the strongest opposition to any further concessions, and, at an interview with Arnauld, Nicole, and Sainte-Marthe, argued the point with such vehemence that he fell fainting to the ground.
Their mother died in 1626 or 1628, and in 1630 their father went to live in Paris amongst the men of science of his time. He trained his gifted son with the greatest care, and Madame Périer has told us of the child's astonishing precocity, how he refused to rest without knowing the reason for everything, and how, when purposely kept from mathematical books, he worked out for himself at twelve the propositions of Euclid as far as the thirty-second in the first book. Still more, at sixteen he wrote a treatise on conic sections which called forth the mingled incredulity and astonishment of Descartes, and indeed forms the foundation of the modern treatment of the subject. It was never published, but Leibnitz saw it, and Pascal himself gave a résumé of it in his Essai pour les Coniques (1640). His father's protest against one of Richelieu's financial measures brought him into trouble, and indeed drove him awhile into hiding, but the cardinal's anger was abated by the intercessions of Jacqueline and her charming acting in a representation by young girls of Sendéry's L'Amour Tyrannique. Richelieu sent him as Intendant to Rouen in 1641, and here about 1646 an accident brought him into contact with the Jansenists, and turned into a new current the destinies of his children. Here the boy gave himself to study with unbroken devotion, despite wretched health and almost incessant sufferings from nervous prostration. To this period belongs his first conversion, and we find him in the intemperate zeal of a first love testifying to the earnestness of his convictions by denouncing to the archbishop the errors in the teaching of a Capuchin monk at Rouen. In 1647 he published his Nouvelles Expériences sur le Vide, and next year occurred his famous Puy de Dôme experiments on atmospheric pressure, which may be said to have completed the work of Galileo and Torricelli. The reputation he gained earned him the jealousy of Descartes, and the attacks of the Jesuit fathers of Montferrand and Paris.
His calculating machine was a brilliant achievement of the first years at Rouen; the later scientific labours of his life were contributions to the infinitesimal calculus, to the theory of the equilib- rium of fluids, the mathematical theory of probability, and the properties of the cycloid. In the very last months of his life we find him busily engaged in a scheme for running omnibuses on the streets of Paris.
In the autumn of 1647 he returned to Paris, and we find him frequently accompanying Jacqueline in her visits to the church of Port Royal. Next year their father returned to Paris as Councillor of State, and took the pair to Clermont for nearly two years. In September 1651 he died, and Jacqueline, now free to carry out her desire, joined Port Royal in the January of 1652. From some of her exaggerated phrases Pascal has been needlessly supposed to have lived a worldly life with the Duc de Roannez and other friends, and his Discours sur les Passions de l'Amour has been interpreted as inspired by a hopeless passion for Charlotte Gouffier de Roannez, the duke's sister, then about sixteen years old. Certain it breathes a genuine passion throughout, and there can be little doubt that it was written out of some real experience. If Pascal did love her, it is most probable that he never told his love, for he continued to the close the warm friend and correspondent of herself and her brother alike. She vacillated awhile between the cloister and the world, passed through her novitiate at Port Royal, then married the Duc de la Feuillade, saw her children die and her own health decay, and early sank into the grave.
In the autumn of 1654 Pascal's second conversion occurred, and from this period date those severe and gloomy austerities which darkened his life and doubtless hastened him to the grave. The immediate occasion may have been a narrow escape from death through his horses running away when driving to Neully, but the moment that remained ever sacred in his memory was that of a remarkable vision or ecstasy, November 23, 1654, commemorated in a few broken sentences of impassioned and mystical devotion in his Profession of Faith, or Amulet, as Condorcet called it, which was found after his death, copied in his own handwriting both on paper and parchment, and sewn into his doublet, being apparently stitched anew into every change of clothes. (See, but only for its facts, Lélut's L'Amulette de Pascal, 1846.) From this time a complete change passed over his life; he subjected himself to the most rigid mortifications, complete denial of self, boundless charity, and absolute obedience to his spiritual director, and ever wore around his body a girdle of iron, the sharp points of which he would press into his flesh when he felt in danger from worldly temptations or wandering thoughts. For a time he lived in Port Royal, and henceforth he threw himself with a passionate devotion into its cause. Arnauld was condemned by the Sorbonne in 1655, not merely for doubting whether the famous Five Propositions condemned were actually contained in the work of Jansen, but also for asserting the identity of the Augustinian and Jansenist doctrines of gratia efficacis, and for declaring that the arguments used against the Augustinus were themselves erroneous or falsified; and his friends now thought the time had come for the public to be informed about the whole question at issue.
In a happy hour Pascal was induced to lend his pen to the cause, and on the 23d January 1656, in the interval between the first and second judgment of the Sorbonne on Arnauld, appeared A Letter written to a Provincial by one of his Friends. A second was issued a few days later, and as its successors followed he assumed the pseudonym of 'Louis de Montalte.' These 'little letters'—the greatest tracts for the times that were ever issued—flew from hand to hand, and the rage and fury of the Jesuits knew no bounds. Never before had been seen in the whole range of controversy such delicate yet scathing irony, such lightness of touch yet keenness of thrust, such Socratic directness and point, such mastery of incisive argument wedded to perfect grace and felicity of phrase and rare distinction of style. 'The best comedies of Molière have not more wit than the first Provincial Letters,' says Voltaire, and he adds, 'Bossuet has nothing more sublime than the concluding ones.' Voltaire tells us that Bossuet himself confessed that had he not written his own, he would rather have written them than any other book he knew; even Madame de Sévigné bowed her head before their sovereign delicacy and perfection of style; Boileau owned them unsurpassed in ancient or modern times; Perrault places them above Plato for wit, Lucian for delicate and artful raillery, and Cicero's orations for strength and ingenuity of reasoning; and Gibbon tells us that almost every year he perused them with fresh pleasure, and from them learned 'to manage the weapon of grave and temperate irony, even on subjects of ecclesiastical solemnity.' There are altogether eighteen Letters from the pen of Pascal himself, a brief fragment of a nineteenth ascribed to him, and a twentieth on the Inquisition from the pen of M. Le Maître. The first two deal with the special question between Arnauld and the Sorbonne; the third and two concluding letters are closely connected with these; the intervening thirteen (4-16) open up the whole subject of the moral theology of the Jesuits, and form the most formidable attack ever made upon the order. The fabric of the moral theology or casuistry of the Jesuits, with all its subtle equivocations and refinements for the extenuation of sin, appalled the austere soul of Pascal as he read into it; and by the end of the tenth letter, after completing his exposition of their theology, he turns to address the Jesuit fathers directly, and breaks into language of eloquence and indeed sublime denunciation. The eleventh defends the application of the method of raillery to serious subjects; the twelfth and thirteenth rise to an eloquence equalled only in Demosthenes; the sixteenth is that the length of which he excuses because he had not had time to make it shorter. In the composition of his Letters Pascal owed much to the materials collected in the Port Royal work, La Théologie Morale des Jésuites (1644). His quotations were confessedly often furnished for him from the wider reading of friends like Nicole and Arnauld, but he tells us that he himself read Escobar's seven volumes twice through, and never made use of a single passage supplied to him without having specially examined it and its context. It has been charged against him that he sometimes quotes inexactly, and that he is unfair in taking quotations out of their setting, but the real grievance of his adversaries is nothing more than this, that he turns their flank by taking their own positions and developing them practically to their natural conclusions. And if it be said that he treated with too great seriousness the statements and arguments of inferior writers, it must be remembered that all these books were issued under the imprimatur of the order. At auryate the Jesuits were much readier with denial and denunciation than counter-arguments and proof; the replies of Pirot (1657), Daniel (1694), and Dunias (1700) were pitiful failures, and hardly more can be said of the onslaught of Joseph de Maistre (in De l'Eglise Gallicane, 1821) and of the Abbé Maynard's edition of the Letters with a professed refutation (1851). Pascal's own final judgment of his work was expressed in these solemn words: 'Though my Letters be condemned at Rome, what I condemn in them is condemned in Heaven. Ad tuum, Domine Jesu, tribunal appello.'
Between his conversion and the beginning of his great controversy Pascal seems to have lived chiefly at Port Royal under the spiritual guidance of M. de Saci, but he never took up his abode as a regular inmate there. His Letters occupied him till the spring of 1657, and during the following year he busied himself in a scheme for a great Apology of religion, his faith meanwhile being quickened by his belief in the famous Miracle of the Holy Thorn, according to which his niece, Marguerite Périer, a pupil at Port Royal, had been miraculously cured of an obstinate fistula lacrymalis by a touch of a fragment of the crown of Christ. But his health gave way during 1658, and thenceforward to the close he bore the burden of constant suffering with more than saintly patience and resignation. Indeed he laboured to deaden every sensation of pleasure in life, in his food, his studies, and even the affections of his friends. Meanwhile his weakness grew upon him, study and composition became possible only in brief intervals, and on 19th August 1662 he sank to rest under his sister's roof at Paris, his own house having been given up to a poor family one of whose children had been seized with smallpox.
Seven years later (1669) appeared his Pensées, with a preface by Madame Périer's son—the result of the editorial labours on his fragmentary papers of a committee of influential Jansenists. Unhappily these perplexing fragments were garbled to a great extent in the interests of orthodoxy and ecclesiastical policy by exaggerated prudence and misdirected zeal, just as they were in 1776 by Condorcet in the interests of heterodoxy. The Abbé Bossut's edition in 1779 was long accepted as authoritative; but in 1842 Cousin first showed the real state of the case in his celebrated Report to the French Academy, and startled the world by declaring that Pascal was a complete sceptic in philosophy, and a Christian only through external influences entirely unconnected with logic or reason. To M. Prosper Faugère belongs the honour of first giving (1844; Eng. trans. by Pearce, 1850) a complete and authentic text, although all readers will not accept his supposed discovery of the indications of an interior arrangement. Havet, in his edition (1852; 2d ed. 1866), thinks it hopeless to discover the true order, and therefore returns to Bossut's arbitrary but familiar arrangement. Victor Rocher, again (1873), adopts an elaborate arrangement, professedly founded on Pascal's original plan, and maintains that everything falls naturally into it. The best edition is that of M. Molinier (2 vols. 1877-79), an independent arrangement mainly on the lines of Faugère's. It is this last version which has been admirably translated into English by C. Kegan Paul (1885).
Pascal's Pensées are detached thoughts dashed rapidly off, intended as materials to be shaped into his projected Apology for the Christian faith. They are thrilled through and through with passionate emotion and ever-present personality, and they contain some of the most profound, suggestive, and startling thoughts that have ever been expressed on the greatest mysteries within the range of human speculation. From one point of view it is easy to construct from them, as Cousin did, a theory that their author was a pessimist and sceptic of a far deeper dye than Montaigne, but profounder study proves this view but a shallow paradox at best. The conversation with De Saci (first published in 1728 by Des Molets) offers the best key to Pascal's philosophy of life. Here he takes Montaigne and Epictetus as his representatives, the first of the Pyrrhonist, Epicurean, and sceptic, who mocks man's aspirations after spiritual truth, and insists upon his weakness, his ignorance, and doubt; the second, of the Stoic, who looks at man only on his lofty side, insists on his freedom and moral dignity, and points out in his moral nature the image and likeness of God. Pascal regards these two opposites as united in the gospel of Christ, the overwhelming certainty of which arises out of its alone affording a key to the tormenting anomalies and contradictions of nature, at once to the moral law as revealed by conscience within and to all the disorder of the world as discovered by conscious experience—to man's greatness and man's degradation, and the reason for both the one and the other. Man's spiritual capacity alone enables him to realise his intrinsic greatness, which was revealed to him once for all when for his sake the Highest was joined to the lowest, in the incarnate union of Divine Power and Love with human degradation and pain. This is a mystery beyond man's power of demonstration, and a deeper ground for certainty must be sought in its essential correspondence, not with the intellect alone, but with the whole complex nature of man. Yet with all this there exist in the Pensées startling fragments deeply tinged with scepticism, although many of these may be interpreted with Sainte-Beuve as a kind of shorthand notes to fix ideas that flashed across his mind of difficulties to be afterwards considered. Of these none is more famous than the wager essay, in which, as has been said, and with truth, Pascal plays at pitch and toss with the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Such a passage as this is a product, says Tulloch, of one of those 'moments of terrible doubt, when the soul is so borne away on the surge of the sceptical wave that rises from the depth of all human speculation that it can only cling to the Divine by an effort of will, and with something of the gamemaker's thought that this is the winning side.' The Pensées owe much to Montaigne and Charron, and, as Molinier has shown, to the 13th-century Spanish writer Raymond Martin.
The only complete editions of Pascal's works that need be mentioned are those of Bossut (1779), Lahure (1858), and Faugère (8 vols. 1886 et seq.). Of the Provincial Letters, besides the Abbé Maynard's edition (1851) already mentioned, and M. Lesieur's reprint of the original quarto (1867), there are editions by Villemain (1829), De Sacy (1877), De Soyres (Lond. 1880), L. Derome (1885 et seq.), and Molinier (2 vols. 1891). The famous Latin translation by Wendrock [Nicole], for which he read his Terence thrice over, appeared at Cologne as early as 1658. There are English translations by Royston (1657), Pearce (1849), and Dr M'Crie (1846). Of the Pensées there are editions by Frantin (1835), Faugère (1844, containing what seems to be the most authentic portrait), Havet, with an admirable commentary (1852; 3d ed. 1881), Lahure (1858), Louandre (1854), Rochet (1873), and Molinier (1877-79). English translations are those by Walker (1688), Craig (1825), Pearce (1850), and Kegan Paul (1885). For Jacqueline Pascal's Life, see the works by Cousin (1845) and Sophy Winthrop Weizel, Sister and Saint (New York, 1880). Her miscellaneous writings, letters, and poems, together with those of Madame Périer and Marguerite Périer, were edited by Faugère (Paris, 1845).
See vols. ii. and iii. of Sainte-Beuve's Port Royal (1842-48), and Charles Beard's Port Royal (1861); the studies by Reuchlin (Stutt. 1840), Vinet (1856), Cousin (1857), H. Weingarten (Leip. 1863), Dreydorff (admirable, Leip. 1870), Tulloch, in 'Foreign Classics' (1878), and Joseph Bertrand (1891). Admirable articles on Pascal are those in the Edinburgh Review for January 1847 (by Henry Rogers), the Quarterly Review for October 1879, the British Quarterly Review for October 1884 (by C. Kegan Paul), and Dean Church in Companions for the Devout Life (1875). See also the articles ARNAULD, JANSEN, and PORT ROYAL in this work.