Our dependence on God

Pascal’s most interesting and predominant philosophical view is his insistence for our dependence on God. While few of his contemporaries in 17th-century France could be considered atheists in the modern sense of the term, Pascal’s conviction of the need for God in both a functioning society and our own personal lives stands out as particularly strong. The aporetic beliefs he enunciates in the Pensées were formed in the context of civil unrest brought about by the Fronde, a series of revolts led by the aristocracy against the French monarchy, which later motivated Louis XIV to restrict the regional nobility’s power in favor of the Crown and further restrict religious tolerance.

Persistent health issues from infancy and a lack of autonomy in his personal life no doubt contributed to Pascal’s pessimism about human existence. He experienced a sudden awakening of religious fervor and converted to Jansenism, an offshoot of Catholicism that believed in predestination and that one could only be saved from original sin by God’s Grace. The Pensées are an aporetic religious text, in which Pascal lays out the misery of Man’s existence on Earth to turn us towards God’s greatness. We shall examine how Pascal makes the case for our dependence on God in several aspects of human existence, ranging from the self to morality and political authority, and the argument to believe in God articulated in Pascal’s Wager..

In opposition to his contemporaries the rationalists, Pascal was much more dubious concerning the power of our reason to determine the truth. There are instinctive principles–such as time, space, and movement–that one knows instinctively, without reason’s supervenience. Those are the “intuitions of the heart” (fg 282) which humble our reason, and make us aware of its deficiencies. By reason we can infer knowledge, for nature has bestowed us precious few certainties, but our knowledge will always be inferior to God’s because His reason is perfect. Pascal claims that some lucky few people intuitively know the truth of religion, while the rest of us must approach it by our flawed reason and pray to God for assistance, without which we cannot have salvation. We are dependent on God for real knowledge, since our reason is flawed and our intuitions are limited.

Within the broader context of a functional society, Pascal’s pessimism extends to concepts of morality and justice. He subscribes to a relativist account of morality, according to which the moral norms of human society–upheld by several of his contemporaries as natural principles–are but accustomed principles which evolved differently among cultures. Morality develops with custom, and the only true principles are those of God, which we must attempt to follow even though we are incapable of fully understanding them. Since there is no true morality to be found, our conception of justice is equally flawed: the ideal of justice is a myth since human nature is too imperfect to apply meaningful judgment. Justice must rely on force to enact anything significant, and legitimize itself with the strength of God to have any real power. This view explains the legitimacy of the French absolute monarchy, which was conceived as governing through divine right. Thus to have justice, we require God’s illumination.

Finally, we might examine Pascal’s explicit argument for believing in God, called Pascal’s Wager. The argument goes as follows: there are two possible realities, in which God either exists or not, and two possible attitudes on our behalf, to believe in Him or abstain from belief. In the event that God is real, we lose everything by not believing in Him; in the event that He is not, we lose nothing by believing. The immense benefit of salvation compared to burning in Hell, Pascal thinks, should make the choice an obvious one. This view has since been contested as logically flawed, but in Pascal’s mind, and most of his contemporaries, the existence of God was inevitable, so the choice should be easy for us to make. Our options are not so much abstract belief and possible retribution, but the very real terror of eternal punishment or the rescue of salvation, through an all-powerful God who provides the only path to knowledge, love, morality, justice, and everything more through his omnipotence.