The Logic of the Heart
The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know: it is felt in a thousand different ways. It loves the highest being by nature, and itself by nature, according as it gives itself up to those reasons; it hardens itself against this and that, according to its own choice. You have rejected this and kept that: out of rational deliberation?
The life and thought of Blaise Pascal present a fascinating synthesis of Scientific rigor and religious fervor, at the heart of the Cartesian Epistemological reformation. Born into a period of intense religious revival in France, Pascal’s formative years were steeped in the rigors of Catholic reform and mathematical innovation, as prominent figures like François de Sales and Vincent de Paul worked to restore the Church’s spiritual foundations. Pascal’s early exposure to these influences, combined with his father’s pragmatic yet devout approach to religion, laid the groundwork for a duality that would characterize his life: a devotion to scientific inquiry on one hand and a growing commitment to spiritual contemplation on the other. His early intellectual precocity, evident in his groundbreaking contributions to mathematics, coexisted with a restrained, though sincere, adherence to the faith, reflecting a broader intellectual trend of the time, where scientific rationalism and religious belief occupied distinct yet complementary spheres of thought. Victor Hugo referred to Pascal's aphoristic style as "Pascal's lightning" and Nietzsche noted that Pascal's influence is pure effect without precursor. He left the world with a short, fragmented body of work, but his influence has been outsized.
His profound skepticism of pure human reason, as seen in his Pensées, had a lasting impact on existential and Christian thought (preceding the Kantian reproach of The English Empiricists), influencing later thinkers who wrestled with the limits of rationality and the necessity of super-rational a priori assumptions. His association with the Jansenist movement and his defense of it in Les Provinciales - published under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte - challenged the Jesuits and contributed to religious debates in France and became popular among Protestants. Beyond philosophy, Pascal made significant advances in probability theory and geometry, created rudimentary calculators (which Leibnitz used to create the first computers).
Pascal stood in the middle (quite literally) between Scholasticism and the new Cartesian Rationalism of the Enlightenment. Scholasticism, which sought to prove the harmony between faith and reason, theology and philosophy, ended up demonstrating their incompatibility. After centuries of effort, it showed that something could be true in theology and false in philosophy. Scholasticism, built on a Pagan premise, collapsed, leading to a century of reform. Applying Pascal's idea that "every progress is a new kind of error," we see that philosophy was discarded in favor of theology during the Reformation and exactly the opposite in the Secular Enlightenment, creating a one-sided focus on faith or Aristotelian reason; precisely the dichotomy it sought to fix. The 16th century was perhaps the least philosophical period, as theology dominated. However, the philosophical 17th century, influenced by nominalism and realism, over-corrected this deficiency. The old scholastic debate about universals evolved into a new dichotomy: matter vs. spirit, empiricism vs. rationalism.
Pascal shared this context, blending skepticism and devout faith, keeping his skepticism within limits and embracing the religious, mystical side of rationalism. He wrote "One must have the three qualities: Mathematician, skeptic and devout Christian". Pascal's Apology of Christianity is only a great idea of the union of knowledge and faith, philosophy and religion. He saw God as central, not as a mere mechanism for justifying knowledge, and believed that philosophy should be religious. Pascal's existential view of human grandeur and misery contrasted with Descartes' purely intellectual approach. While Descartes began with cogito (thinking), Pascal emphasized the heart, love, and faith. For Pascal, true religion recognized both human greatness and human misery, with Christ as the mediator who embodied the union of God and human weakness. Thus, Pascal transformed abstract philosophical concepts into ethical terms, making the tension between mind and body an ethical issue of greatness and misery. His Christian Apology sought to unite knowledge and faith, philosophy and religion; and calm the raging intellectual seas of Scholasticism. Grace is a permeating reality which gives the intelligence of man its form and function.
On the Wretchedness of Mankind
"Pascal looks at the whole world as a collection of wicked and unfortunate people created to be damned, among whom however God has chosen from all eternity a few souls, that is to say one in five or six million, to be saved."
— Voltaire, Treatise on Metaphysics
The negativity of the Medieval-Aristotelian worldview is still strong in Pascal, so much so that Nietzsche compared his philosophy to Schopenhauer's Pessimism. This negativity came most sharply from his involvement from the 17th-century Jansenist movement. The teachings of this movement stems from Cornelius Jansen, particularly from his own reading of Augustine, which emphasized the necessity of divine grace for salvation. This doctrine argued that human nature is fundamentally corrupt due to original sin, making it impossible for individuals to achieve salvation without the intervention of God’s grace. Over time, Jansenism developed an austere and severe approach to Christian life, and the unholiness of the human body, focusing heavily on moral rigor and the belief that only a few are predestined for salvation. It was, essentially, "Calvinistic Catholicism", if you will. The Catholic church eventually condemned Jansenism for its negativity towards the body and Calvinistic-Gnostic understanding of human nature, and the movement declined and eventually dissipated.
The Jansenists' disdain for human reason is rooted in their particular reading of Augustine which reflects a specific medieval Aristotelian reinterpretation of his theology we see broadly across the Scholastics. While Augustine himself emphasized the necessity of grace, he did not entirely deny the value of human reason or effort. In the hands of Jansenists and other medieval theologians, however, Augustine's teachings were adapted to reflect a more dualistic and negative view of human nature. The Jansenist view, in particular, bordered on a kind of Calvinistic Anthropology, in which the material world and the human body were seen as corrupt, and only divine grace could redeem the soul. This Gnostic understanding of the body is at odds with the Aristotelian view, which saw the body and soul as one, and reason as a natural, God-given tool for understanding the world, yet relies on Aristotelian logic.
Aristotle's influence on the Scholastics, especially Aquinas, led to a more integrated view of human nature. Broadly speaking, the Scholastics saw human beings as composed of body and soul, with reason acting as a bridge between the material and the divine. The scholastic synthesis of faith and reason allowed for a more optimistic view of human capabilities, even in a post-fall world. Although humanity was marked by sin, reason was still seen as part of the divine image and a gift from God that could lead people to truth. In contrast, Pascal and the Jansenists took a much darker view, a movement which Calvin was raised in, seeing human reason as fundamentally flawed and incapable of leading people to salvation. This is still all Medieval-Aristotelian in nature, but two different flavors. In a letter to his family, he writes:
"The graces that God gives in this life are the measure of the glory that he prepares in others. Also, when I foresee the end and the crowning of his work, by the beginnings which appear in people of piety, I enter into a veneration which gives me respect towards those whom he seems to have chosen for his elect. It seems to me that I already see them in one of these thrones where those who have left everything will judge the world with Jesus Christ, according to the promise he made. But when I come to think that these people can fall, and on the contrary be among the unfortunate number of those judged, and that there will be so many who will fall from their glory, and who will allow others, through their negligence, to take the crown that God had offered them, I cannot bear this thought: and the terror that I would have of seeing them in this eternal state of misery, after having imagined them, with so much reason, in the other state, makes me turn the mind away from this idea, and return to God to beg him not to abandon the weak creatures he has acquired, and say to him with Saint Paul: “Lord, complete the work that you yourself even started. » Saint Paul often considered himself in these two states; and this is what makes him say elsewhere: “I chastise my body, and I reduce it to servitude, lest after having preached to others, I myself should be reprobated. » (I Cor. , ix 27.)"
Jansenism also held that human merit in good works is entirely a result of divine grace, leaving no room for human agency or natural reason. This led to a mindset of extreme self-depreciating asceticism among Jansenists, as they viewed all human actions as tainted by sin unless driven by grace. Such views resulted in a culture of excessive self-denial, distrust of natural pleasures, and a strong disdain for secular philosophies, especially those that emphasized human reason. The movement’s opposition to free will and its emphasis on the futility of human effort without divine intervention marked it as a unique and controversial force within the broader Christian tradition. John Calvin, also steeped in the unique Medieval reading of Augustine, would adopt the same anachronistic interpretation. Thus, broadly the aestheticism of the West in the Middle Ages took on a different feel due to this metaphysical shift towards a specific Aristotelian-Medieval reading of Augustine, which implemented a Gnostic Anthropology. Voltaire notes several times that he dislikes Pascal's negative view of mankind, but recognizes that the critics of Christianity inadvertently are assuming Christian metaphysics- a version of Pascal's wager. Voltaire walked this line between criticizing religious authorities, but viewing irreligious power as even worse:
"What disgusts some readers most is the despotic, contemptuous tone in which he begins. -If this religion boasted a perfect knowledge of God, a knowledge which it possessed undisguised and unveiled, it would be very bold; it could be combated by proving that nothing in the world proves the existence of God with proofs. But since, on the contrary, it teaches that people live in darkness and alienation from God, it is a nice way to teach. God has withdrawn Himself from their knowledge; the very name He gives Himself in the Scriptures is: Deus absconditus; since, moreover, she wants to make these two facts known in the same way: that on the one hand God has given the Church visible signs so that those who sincerely seek him may find him, and that on the other hand he has hidden them so that only those who seek him with all their heart may find him: what good can it do them, after they have so casually admitted that they also seek the truth, to cry out that the truth is nowhere to be found? In fact, this very ignorance of theirs, for which they accuse the Church, only confirms one of these assertions without violating the other, and, far from overturning it, only reaffirms the Church's teaching."
On the Darkening of the Strong: Nietzsche's Love for Pascal and Dostoevsky
Pascal had an outsized impact through the revival of his works by Voltaire, and then by Nietzsche. His sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, in her introduction to The Will to Power Part II wrote:
"He loved Pascal as one of his equals; he perceived his downfall as that of a beloved friend, indeed as if it threatened him himself."
Nietzsche said there are only two Christians he respects: Dostoevsky and Pascal in a letter to Georg Brandes dated November 20,1888:
"I absolutely believe your words about Dostoevsky; I appreciate him, on the other hand, as the most valuable psychological material I know - I am grateful to him in a strange way, however much he goes against my lowest instincts. Approximately my relationship with Pascal, whom I almost love because he has taught me infinitely; the only logical Christian."
Nietzsche probably read several of Pascal's works, but his commentary on Pascal displays a heavy focus on Pascal's Pensées. All of the ideas which Nietzsche discusses about Pascal are found in this manuscript. This is the only work which Nietzsche mentions specifically:
"The most profound and unexhausted books will probably always have something of the aphoristic and sudden character of Pascal's Pensées. The driving forces and valuations are long under the surface; what emerges is effect." (The Will to Power, Part II, 1884)
He explicitly mentions this work several times including in The Happy Science (1882), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Antichrist (1888) and Twilight of the Idols (1888). Nietzsche recognizes Pascal as a great mind:
"Laying down one's life for a cause" - great effect. But one lays down one's life for many things: the emotions all want their satisfaction. Whether it is pity or anger or revenge - the fact that one's life is at stake changes nothing of its value. How many have sacrificed their lives for the sake of pretty women - and even, what is worse, their health! If one has the temperament, one instinctively chooses the dangerous things: e.g. the adventures of speculation, if one is a philosopher; or of immorality, if one is virtuous. One kind of man wants to risk nothing, the other wants to risk. Are we others despisers of life? On the contrary, we instinctively seek a potentiated life, life in danger ... In this, again, we do not wish to be more virtuous than others. Pascal, for example, did not want to risk anything and remained a Christian: that was perhaps virtuous. - One always sacrifices."
Nietzsche connected Schopenhauer to Pascal- he believed his beloved Schopenhauer was taking up the mantle of Pascal. Nietzsche believed they contained a shared pessimism about the human condition. Pascal’s warning against Rational resonates with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of denial. Both Pascal and Schopenhauer viewed humanity’s inability to recognize truth as a consequence of "our corruption, of our moral decay," leading both to the conclusion that salvation or negation was necessary. In Nietzsche’s view, both thinkers fell into a trap of denying life rather than affirming it, retreating into resignation instead of embracing the chaos and uncertainty of existence and moving beyond it to a pre-rational, amoral will-to-power. Schopenhauer and Heidegger are unlikely allies of Pascal, but here they criticize Cartesian Rationality along similar (albeit, significantly more intellectually robust) lines of thought. Nietzsche notes this correlation:
"Without the Christian faith, said Pascal, you will become yourselves, like nature and history, un monstre et un chaos." We have fulfilled this prophecy: after the weakly optimistic eighteenth century had prettified and rationalized man. Schopenhauer and Pascal, - In an essential sense, Schopenhauer is the first to take up Pascal's movement again: un monstre et un chaos, hence something to be denied ... History, nature, man himself!"
"Our inability to recognize the truth is the consequence of our corruption, of our moral decay": so Pascal. And so basically Schopenhauer. "The deeper the corruption of reason, the more necessary the doctrine of salvation" - or, in Schopenhauerian terms, the negation."
There is also a significant correlation between Pascal and Schopenhauer's belief in the primacy of the Will. Pascal writes in Pensées (Reflections) something that sounds exactly what Schopenhauer:
"The will is a principal organ of faith: not because it forms faith, but because things appear true or false according to the side from which they are viewed. The will, which likes the one more than the other, prevents the mind from looking at the qualities from the side it does not like: and so the mind pulls together with the will and dwells only on the side it likes; and by judging according to what it sees, it imperceptibly regulates its faith according to the inclination of its will."
Nietzsche’s self-described mission was to destroy the Christian ideal, not because of its theological doctrines, which he dismissed as irrelevant, but because of its moral system. Whether or not God exists, the incarnation actually happened, or if the theology of the church is true or not, is wildly irrelevant to Nietzsche; he never breaches the subject. Christianity, in his view, glorifies weakness, submission, and self-denial, all of which stand in opposition to the life-affirming values Nietzsche championed. Pascal’s downfall, in Nietzsche’s eyes, illustrates the danger of this Christian ideal, a danger that has led many strong individuals to turn against their own greatness. Pascal was great- but he bound himself to only do Good, and rejected Greatness: "greatness instills arrogance... That something so obvious as vanity is so little known to the world that it is strange and surprising to think that seeking greatness is foolishness: that is wonderful." This rejection of amoral power is what drew Nietzsche's disdain. In The Will to Power, Part II, 1884 we have a rant from Nietzsche on Pascal:
"Christianity should never be forgiven for destroying people like Pascal. One should never cease to fight this very thing about Christianity: that it has the will to break the strongest and noblest souls. We should never give ourselves peace as long as this one thing has not yet been destroyed to the ground: the ideal of man invented by Christianity, its demands on man, its "no" and its "yes". The whole absurd remnant of Christian fable, conceptual spin and theology is none of our business; it could be a thousand times more absurd and we would not lift a finger against it. But we fight that ideal which, with its morbid beauty and seduction of women, with its secret slanderer's eloquence, speaks to all the cowardice and vanity of weary souls - and the strongest have weary hours - as if all that, what may seem most useful and desirable in such conditions, trust, guilelessness, unpretentiousness, patience, love for one's equals, surrender, devotion to God, a kind of shielding and abdication of one's whole self, is also in itself the most useful and desirable; as if the small, modest freak of soul, the virtuous average animal and herd sheep of man, not only took precedence over the stronger, more evil, more covetous, more defiant, more wasteful and therefore a hundred times more endangered species of man, but actually provided the ideal, the goal, the measure, the highest desirability for man in general. This erection of an ideal has hitherto been the most sinister temptation to which man has been exposed: for with it the stronger exceptions and fortunate cases of man, in which the will to power and to the growth of the whole type of man takes a step forward, were threatened with destruction; with its values the growth of those more human beings was to be dug up at the root, who for the sake of their higher demands and tasks voluntarily also lead a more dangerous life (economically expressed: Increasing entrepreneurial costs as much as the improbability of success). What do we fight against in Christianity? That it wants to break the strong, that it wants to discourage their courage, to take advantage of their bad hours and weariness, to turn their proud security into unrest and distress of conscience, that it knows how to make the noble instincts poisonous and sick, until their strength, their will to power turns backwards, turns against itself, - until the strong perish from the excesses of self-contempt and self-misconduct: that gruesome kind of ruin of which Pascal is the most famous example."
The Perennial Mind-Body Problem
Applied to human beings, the body is the material component, and the soul (or spirit) is the form or organizing principle that gives life and consciousness. For Aquinas, the soul was the "form" of the body, meaning that it was not a separate substance but the principle that animates the body and makes it a living, rational being. The soul was responsible for both mental and physical activities. This means that while the soul could exist without the body (as in the afterlife), in this life the soul and body were deeply intertwined. This basic understanding of the soul tracks largely with the historic Judeo-Christian view, but the teachings of Aristotle concerning the soul as the "form" of the body, specifically that the soul and body make one substance, was a subtle but profound shift in theology. The soul is also knowable and rational to Aquinas, with a tripartite division of the faculties of the soul between vegetative, sensitive, and rational.
Descartes re-introduced substance dualism, sharply dividing mind and body into two radically different entities. Descartes emphasized the rational nature of the soul by claiming that thinking and reasoning were the essence of the soul. In his famous dictum, "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), Descartes argued that the ability to think was the undeniable proof of the soul’s existence. Unlike the Scholastic focus on the soul as the form of the body (as in Aristotle’s model), Descartes saw the soul as primarily a thinking, self-aware entity, separate from and superior to the body’s physical functions. Heidegger notes in Being and Time:
"The fact that Descartes was "dependent" on medieval scholasticism and used its terminology is clear to anyone familiar with the Middle Ages. But nothing is gained philosophically with this "discovery" as long as the fundamental implications of this influence of medieval ontology on the ontological determination, or non-determination, of res cogitans for the subsequent period remain unclear. This scope can only be assessed once the meaning and limits of ancient ontology have been shown from the orientation towards the question of being. In other words, destruction is faced with the task of interpreting the ground of ancient ontology in the light of the problem of temporality. Here it becomes apparent that the ancient interpretation of the being of the existent is oriented towards the "world" or "nature" in the broadest sense and that it does indeed gain its understanding of being from "time". The external document for this - but admittedly only that - is the definition of the sense of being as παρουσία (parousia) and οὐσία (ousia), which ontologically-temporally means "presence". Being is conceived in its being as "presence", i.e. it is understood with regard to a certain mode of time, the "present"."
On one level, this was a repudiation of Scholastic thought as the early church understood soul as immaterial and of a different substance, but Descartes also conflated Thinking (and thus, identity) with the soul. This also led to the development of the Miltonian-Dantean understanding of heaven and hell. To Descartes, the mind (or soul) is a non-material, thinking substance (res cogitans), while the body is a material, extended substance (res extensa). These two substances have fundamentally different properties: the mind is characterized by thought, while the body is characterized by spatial extension. In German, Mind and Spirit are the same word: Geist, so linguistically this is easy to do in most central European languages. This Cartesian dualism revolutionized how philosophers approached questions of consciousness, leading to ongoing debates that persist today. In the post-Cartesian period, many philosophers, like Spinoza and Leibniz immediately following Descartes, rejected pure Cartesian dualism and proposed monistic solutions to the mind-body problem; mind is matter. In contemporary philosophy, the mind-body problem remains a central issue, particularly in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences. Consciousness is still an enigma, even to the most Materialistic and Monistic intellectuals. Many modern thinkers assume a physicalism or functionalism, yet the Gestalt reality of Conscious experience continues to undermine this Neo-Monisticism.
Ironically, the systematic incorporation of Aristotle into Christian theology eventually re-energized a Platonic understanding of the soul, which was rejected for a Christianized version of the Hebrew concept of the soul being "life". To be more specific, the Scholastic period saw a new understanding of the soul which merged Aristotle and Plato together in a syncretic unity with Augustinian theology. The Christian concept has always understood the soul as immutable and divine, and separate from the physical body, but this Scholastic Paganism moved identity from the body to the soul. Cartesianism continued this Body-Mind Duality which impacted the Body-Soul duality in a syncretic dialectic between Science and theology, shifting the location of identity from the Body as in the Ancient Judeo-Christian understanding, to the Soul (i.e. Geist/ Spirit/ "Mind"). Thus, Platonism's Trans-migration of the soul manifests in the Christian west, even though this Paganism was stripped out by the early fathers, even Augustine himself who clearly drew a line between his new Faith and his old religions Manicheanism and Platonism. To this day, this Pagan understanding of the Soul being the house of identity, not the body, persists broadly in the Western world. The result of this is that the bodily resurrection on a New Heaven and New Earth takes a backseat. The body becomes a "vessel" for the soul, instead of forming a body-soul "duality" which is the "you", as early Christianity taught.
Pascal's Night of Fire: That which Gives Reason Reality
Human meditation has no limits. At its own risk, it analyzes and digs its own dazzle. One could almost say that, by a kind of splendid reaction, it dazzles nature; the mysterious world which surrounds us gives back what it deserves, it is probable that the contemplators are contemplated. In any case, there are men on earth - are they men? - who see distinctly in the depths of the horizons of the dream the heights of the absolute, and who have the terrible vision of the infinite mountain. Monseigneur Bienvenu was not one of these men, Monseigneur Bienvenu was not a genius. He would have feared those sublimities from which some, very great ones even, like Swedenborg and Pascal, slipped into insanity. Certainly, these powerful reveries have their moral utility, and by these arduous roads one approaches ideal perfection. He took the path that leads to salvation, the Gospel.
— Victor Hugo, 1866, The Toiler of the Sea
On Monday, November 23, 1654, between 10:30 PM and 12:30 AM, Pascal experienced an intense religious conversion, which he described as a direct encounter with the divine. He wrote down a fragmented set of notes during this mystical experience on scraps of paper, which he later copied onto one parchment, now known as the Mémorial. On this parchment, Pascal expressed his overwhelming sense of God's presence, joy, and the realization of the Christian faith as the ultimate truth. The Mémorial is more poetry than philosophy, and cryptic in nature.
Following this "Night of Fire," as his biographers have called it, Pascal's life took a dramatic turn toward deeper religious devotion and opposition to the "Pure Reason" of the budding Empiricist movement. He became deeply involved with Jansenism, a Catholic reform movement that emphasized human sinfulness, divine grace, and predestination. Pascal's later works, such as the Pensées (his central collection of thoughts on religion and philosophy), were heavily influenced by this transformative event. In these writings, Pascal addressed the limits of human reason in reference to Descartes' works, the necessity of the "leap" of faith, and the human condition’s dependence on God’s grace. His "Night of Fire" is considered one of the most significant moments in Pascal’s life, reshaping his philosophical and theological outlook and inspiring his contributions to Christian rationality and metaphysics.
This scrap of parchment was so important to Pascal that he copied it and sewed both copies into the lining of his doublet. The next day, feeling the need to tell his sister Jacqueline about the night of the fire, he asked for a director of conscience. Father Antoine Singlin received Blaise Pascal at Port-Royal de Paris around December 20, but refused to become his spiritual advisor, and advised him to retire to Port-Royal-des-Champs. After that, Pascal took care to sew and unstitch the two copies of his memorial each time he changed clothes. The experience was so overwhelming that Pascal committed himself to a "total and gentle renunciation, to the oblivion of the world and of everything", in a climate of joy bathed in tears.
For the rest of his life, Pascal remained absolutely silent about the double manuscript: no one knew of its existence, including his sister Jacqueline, a nun in Port-Royal des Champs, whose anxious reaction to the change in this "rejoicing penitent" Laurent Thirouin recalls. Those close to Pascal spoke of a "memorial": one witness reported that they saw this document as "a kind of memorial that he kept very carefully to preserve the memory of something that he wanted to keep always before his eyes and mind". While the parchment copy has now disappeared, the original paper, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, has been authenticated by Pascal's nephew, Abbé Périer. After his death, a servant discovered in the lining of his last suit "a small folded parchment written in the hand of Mr. Pascal, and in this parchment a paper written in the same hand: one was a faithful copy of the other".
Pascal’s mystical experience can also be understood in the context of Descartes’ contemporaneous redefinition of reason, which marked a clear departure from the medieval Scholastic tradition. Descartes’ cogito (“I think, therefore I am”) placed human reason at the center of philosophical inquiry, inaugurating a modern era of epistemology that emphasized individual cognition and doubt as foundational to knowledge. By contrast, Pascal’s experience undermines the Cartesian project of rational certainty. The "Certitude" Pascal expresses is not derived from logical deduction or empirical observation but from an unmediated, affective encounter with the divine. Here, "certainty" is not the product of discursive reason, but a direct, unmediated apprehension of divine truth that brings with it an overwhelming sense of peace and joy that transcends mere emotional experience. This is an instance of "pneuma" at work—where the Holy Spirit imparts a spiritual illumination that clarifies existence and reorients the self toward a new mode of being that transcends previous epistemological frameworks based on rationality and empiricism. This certitude, therefore, exists outside the boundaries of reason as defined by Descartes and points to a different form of knowledge—one based on Phenomenological and belief rather than abstract rational proof. This was his life-long argument with Descartes—the assumption that there exists a Reason that is non-metaphysical.
In this sense, Pascal's perspective aligns more closely with the existential dimension of Kierkegaardian faith than with the rational certainties sought by Scholastic philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas. Scholasticism had worked to reconcile the God of revelation with the God of reason, articulating a systematic theology based on metaphysical principles—all based on the Pagan philosopher Aristotle. Descartes and other Enlightenment thinkers, in turn, would reduce God to a "first principle" or supreme being that could be understood through reason alone. This is in contrast to the Apostolic Fathers, who fundamentally rejected the idea that God is a "Thing" in any sense. Pascal’s critique rejects both traditions—the old Scholasticism and the new Enlightenment Rationality—by emphasizing the personal and historical God of Christianity—a God who reveals Himself not through abstract logic (i.e., Deistically) but through lived, historical-ecclesial experience. The "God of the philosophers", as conceived by Descartes or even the Scholastics, is a distant, metaphysical entity, while Pascal’s God is immanent, personal, and active in human history. Kierkegaard would pick up this critique and build it out in ways Pascal could not have imagined.
Pascal was a great scientist, physicist, engineer, philosopher of reason and advocate for reason and science. He was dedicated to bringing reason to the world, along with Descartes. But within him, a reality which bound all realities became sharper than ever: the presence of the Living God. He could not simply let this reality exist in isolation or compartmentalize it, as the idealistic approach of separating truths might do. Instead, this reality forced a reevaluation of all existence from its perspective. Imagine a physicist who at first sees the human body only as a collection of static and dynamic organic or energy structures. But if one day the essence of life itself dawned on him, he would no longer be able to separate the physical structure from the living nature. He would feel compelled to rethink the problem, perhaps creating a "physics of life" in which physical phenomena are reclassified in light of the superior (or "Holy") dynamics of life.
Similarly, if the existence of the intellectual or personal realm were to dawn on this physicist, it would lead to something higher—not merely "higher," but definitely transcendent, coming "from above," i.e., from heaven. For Pascal, the world remains the world, and philosophy remains philosophy. But everything is drawn into a new coherence, and thought is urged to new efforts, by the discovery that God, grasped by the philosopher only as "the Absolute," is in truth the living God who enters into history in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. And man's relationship to him, understood philosophically as "relationship to the Absolute," is revealed in its true form: the life of man himself, directed to God who calls him. He writes in Pensées: "All faith rests in Jesus Christ and Adam; all morality in desire and grace."
Pascal Contra Descartes: The Logical-Metaphysical Postulate Hidden within Systematic Doubt
"Descartes' interpretation of being and truth first creates the precondition for the possibility of a theory of knowledge or metaphysics of knowledge. Only through Descartes realism is enabled to prove the reality of the external world and to save that which exists in itself."
— Heidegger, The Time of the World Image
Pascal was far from a systematic theologian or philosopher. Yet his lay critique of Descartes and scholastic philosophy has endured as a defense of Christian existentialism and a return to a more religiously grounded understanding of human nature and the limits of reason. His critiques specifically target Descartes' mechanistic and rationalist approach, especially as it relates to God, faith, and the nature of human existence. His criticisms do not stand up in terms of sheer intellectualism, but they are full of heart. Descartes argued that the existence of a benevolent God guarantees the reliability of human reason and the truth of clear and distinct ideas. This role of God, however, can be seen as largely mechanistic or deistic, since God was invoked primarily to validate human knowledge rather than to be worshipped or existentially related. Pascal famously quipped that Descartes' God was "a little too much of a philosopher's God." He essentially accuses Descartes of seeing God only as a certifier of knowledge:
"I cannot forgive Descartes: he would have liked it too much if he could have made do without God in all his philosophy; but he could not refrain from giving him a nudge to set the world in motion; after that, he has nothing more to do with God."
"One must generally say: This is done by design and movement, for that is true. But to say what design and motion, and to assemble the machine, is ridiculous; for it is useless, uncertain, and laborious. And if this were true, we would not think the whole philosophy worth a single hour's labor."
In Passions of the Soul, Descartes explores the nature of human emotions in an attempt to provide a mechanistic explanation of how the body and mind interact to produce passions. Descartes argues that passions, or emotions, are not solely the result of the mind, but are influenced by bodily processes. He defines passions as "perceptions, feelings, or emotions of the soul" that are caused, maintained, and intensified by the movement of animal spirits within the body. This physiological component is key to understanding Descartes' theory, as he views the body as a complex machine in which movements and changes in the brain, particularly in a gland he locates at the center (often interpreted as the pineal gland), influence emotions. For Descartes, passions are not purely mental, but arise from the interaction of the body with the mind, and he sees them as necessary to guide human action, although he believes they should be controlled by reason.
While Descartes viewed human passions through a mechanistic and physiological lens, Pascal approached the subject with a more theological and existential perspective, considering the human condition as defined by both its grandeur and wretchedness. Pascal famously critiqued Descartes for over-relying on reason and failing to account for the deeper spiritual aspects of human existence. Their interaction highlights a broader philosophical tension: where Descartes saw human passions as manageable through reason and scientific understanding, Pascal believed that true understanding of human emotions required acknowledgment of human dependency on divine grace. Descartes writes:
"Our passions cannot be directly aroused or removed by the action of our will, but they can be indirectly aroused by the representation of those things which are wont to be joined with the passions we wish to have and which are contrary to those we wish to reject."
Pascal’s thought can be seen as a precursor to later critiques of Enlightenment rationalism by existential and phenomenological philosophers, who, like Pascal, would seek to understand human existence and divine reality not through abstract metaphysical systems but through lived experience and personal encounter. Or in other words—Pascal critiqued the idea that Reason is not an experience. Kant would build this metaphysical position out into a staggeringly large body of work against his arch-enemy Hume, asserting that a priori assumptions precede any rationality; reason and logic are as metaphysical as supernatural belief. Jung would push back against the concept of "presuppositionless science" contra his frenemy Sigmund Freud; this debate seen between the simplistic reading of Descartes and Pascal echoes across centuries to the current day. Martin Heidegger in his 1914 Woodland Paths notes the synchronicity between Descartes and Pascal:
"Descartes' basic metaphysical position is historically supported by the Platonic-Aristotelian metaphysics and moves in the same question despite the new beginning: What is Being? The fact that this question does not occur in Descartes' Meditationes only proves how the modified answer to it already determines the basic position. Descartes' interpretation of being and truth first creates the precondition for the possibility of a theory of knowledge or metaphysics of knowledge. Only through Descartes realism is enabled to prove the reality of the external world and to save that which exists in itself."
Almost simultaneously with Descartes, Pascal discovers the logic of the heart in contrast to the logic of calculating reason.
Descartes did not believe that reason alone was sufficient for true knowledge, as his Discourses clearly states that his methods only correspond to material reality and cannot establish any meaningful "truths" or morality. His Epistemology is certified by the existence of absolute Truth—i.e. God. But the interpretation of Descartes is different than the nuanced philosophy he actually taught—his works were interpreted by the English Empiricists and the whole of the Enlightenment in this way. In his early work Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy, Hegel notes:
"But the defect in Anselm's argumentation, which, by the way, Cartesius and Spinoza as well as the principle of immediate knowledge share with it, is that this unity, which is pronounced as the most perfect or also subjectively as the true knowledge, is presupposed, i.e. only assumed as in itself. This hereby abstract identity is immediately opposed by the difference of the two determinations, as has also long since been done against Anselm, i.e., in fact, the idea and existence of the finite is opposed to the infinite, because, as noted earlier, the finite is such an objectivity, which is at the same time not appropriate to the purpose, its essence and concept, is different from it, - or such an idea, such a subjective, which does not involve existence according to Plato, the concepts and principles which the soul innately brings with it into the present life, and by which alone we are able to recognize the real as it is, not as it appears to us through the senses, - are mere memories of those views of things of which the soul was partaker during its intercourse with God. Cartesius leaves it at that, that he refers to the truthfulness of God."
Nietzsche, in his posthumous The Will to Power, takes up Hegel's criticism of Descartes:
"It is thought: consequently there is thinking": this is what Cartesius' argument amounts to. But this means that our belief in the concept of substance is already assumed to be "true a priori": - that, if there is thought, there must be something "that thinks", is simply a formulation of our grammatical habit, which presupposes a doer for a deed. In short, a logical-metaphysical postulate is already made here—and not merely stated... In the way of Cartesius, one does not arrive at something absolutely certain, but only at a fact of a very strong faith. If one reduces the proposition to "it is thought, consequently there are thoughts", one has a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought", is not affected, - namely, in this form the "apparentness" of thought cannot be rejected. What Cartesius wanted, however, is that thought not only has an apparent reality, but a reality in itself."
In Being and Time, Heidegger adds to the pile in arguing that Cartesian Rationality is still partly Metaphysical, and Reason cannot exist without metaphysics:
"With the 'cogito sum', Descartes claims to provide philosophy with new and secure ground. What he leaves undefined in this 'radical' beginning, however, is the mode of being of the res cogitans, or more precisely the sense of being of the 'sum'. The elaboration of the inexpressible ontological foundations of the 'cogito sum' fulfills the stay at the second station on the way of the destructive decline into the history of ontology. The interpretation provides the proof that Descartes not only had to neglect the question of being in general, but also shows why he came to the conclusion that the absolute 'certainty' of the cogito removed him from the question of the meaning of being of this being. The reflections on Descartes should lead to the realization that the seemingly self-evident starting point from the things of the world, just as little as the orientation towards the supposedly strictest knowledge of things, guarantees the extraction of the ground on which the next ontological constitutions of the world, of existence and of the inner-worldly being are to be found phenomenally. But if we remember that spatiality obviously co-consituates the inner-worldly being, then in the end a 'rescue' of the Cartesian analysis of the 'world' becomes possible. By radically emphasizing extensio as the praesuppositum for every determinacy of the res corporea, Descartes has prepared the understanding of an a priori, the content of which Kant then fixed more emphatically. Within certain limits, the analysis of extensio remains independent of the omission of an explicit interpretation of the sense of extended being."
Pascal emphasizes that Reason is inherently relational, and always bound to an "Other" (a foreshadowing of Kierkegaard), resurrecting a pre-Socratic thought from Heraclitus: "That which we share we verify, that which we possess privately we falsify."
"Befindlichkeit" in Augustine and Pascal: Reading Pascal Through Ontochronology
Within the Catholic Church, Augustine experienced a renewal in France, particularly in the 17th century (Descartes, Malebranche, Pascal, Jansenism, Bossuet, Fénélon) and has since remained particularly at home there until the modern Catholic school of apologists in France, which at the same time appropriated Bergsonian ideas (determined by Plotinus). It is not actually Augustine who is at work here, but an Augustinianism already appropriate to church doctrine, which only slightly violates the dogmatic barriers in ontologism. (What Scheler does today is merely a secondary adoption of these circles of thought, dressed up with phenomenology).
"...In contrast to ancient skepticism, Augustine established the absolute reality of inner experience (in a preliminary form of Descartes' 'cogito, ergo sum'). But the turn to metaphysics follows immediately: the veritates aeternae are the ideas in the absolute consciousness of God. It is similar with the analysis of volitional experiences. Knowledge is a character of the essence of substance. The human soul is changeable; it requires an unchanging foundation. This is the inner experience of the existence of God (Augustin, De trinitate)."
— Heidegger, 1921, Augustine and Neoplatonism
Pascal did not see the Thomist forest through the rationalist trees because he was unfortunately steeped in the same Thomist views as Descartes was. But he did identify functional Epistemological problems with the Rationalism of Descartes. Pascal saw a clear line between Augustine and Descartes, arguing that Cogito, ergo sum is not an improvement, but a de-evolution of Augustine's Epistemology:
"I would like to ask fair-minded people whether the principle that 'matter is inherently incapable of thinking' and that 'I think, therefore I am' are in fact the same in the mind of Descartes and in the mind of St. Augustine, who said the same thing 1200 years earlier."
St. Augustine, in his work City of God and particularly in De Trinitate and Confessions, prefigured Descartes' cogito broadly in the search for certainty amid doubt. Augustine argued that even if one doubts everything, including the existence of the external world and the reliability of one’s senses, the fact that one is doubting proves that one exists. In De Trinitate, Augustine states that one’s own existence cannot be doubted: "If I am mistaken, I am." In other words, thinking (or doubting) confirms the existence of the thinker. Augustine’s "I think, therefore I am" is rooted in a search for divine truth, while Descartes’ "Cogito, ergo sum," by contrast, is aimed at establishing a foundation for a rationalist philosophy.
Descartes developed the cogito in a more methodological and epistemological context. His aim was to establish a foundation for knowledge that could withstand radical doubt—a system that encompasses all knowledge. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes systematically doubts everything he previously believed to be true, including the evidence of the senses, the existence of the external world, and even the reliability of mathematical truths. In the midst of this doubt, he arrives at one indubitable truth: "Cogito, ergo sum," or "I think, therefore I am." For Descartes, the act of thinking provides the foundational certainty upon which all other knowledge is built, although this knowledge is only possible due to the existence of God. Pascal understood that both Augustine and Descartes affirmed the indubitability of the thinking self as proof of existence. Yet, for Pascal, Descartes’ approach was sterile or incomplete because it lacked the spiritual depth that Augustine’s argument carried—and the fixation on morality, which Descartes largely ignored. Pascal saw Descartes’ rationalism as limited and superficial compared to Augustine’s theological depth, and not a path to true knowledge, and certainly not a useful knowledge morally or ethically.
Heidegger was far from a Christian: he was an atheist thinker who joined the Nazi Party, which he saw as returning society to a Nietzschean amoral pre-Socratic will to power. Yet he rejected the death of metaphysics as Nietzsche declared at the end of the 20th century. His understanding of the history of Ontology and his quest to know Dasein is unparalleled. Fixated on the question of being, Heidegger was forced to return to Phenomenology, condemning the anti-metaphysics of Nietzsche and other Western materialists. In this way, his work became a strange ally of Fideism against the nihilism of the West. Naturally, Heidegger turned his intellect to one of the greatest accidental ontologists of all time, the former Manichean-Platonist turned Christian Theologian Saint Augustine of Hippo.
Heidegger, of course, interprets Augustine through the lens of Being—what he calls "the only question that matters." He distinguishes between the two aspects of Augustinianism: a Christian Platonism opposed to Aristotle (philosophically) and a theological view of sin and grace. Augustine's focus on inner experience, especially in his Confessions, laid a foundation for later thinkers who imitated this phenomenology. Heidegger critiques some interpretations of Augustine, such as those of Ernst Troeltsch, Adolf von Harnack, and Wilhelm Dilthey, who view Augustine primarily through a cultural-historical, dogmatic-historical, or scientific-historical lens, respectively. These thinkers, Heidegger argues, reduce Augustine's ideas to their relevance within particular frameworks rather than exploring their deeper existential and phenomenological insights. He defends Augustine against all the charges leveled against him—especially that of mere "Platonism," for while Platonism shines through in his emphasis on the soul and de-emphasis of the body, he is a warrior against other elements of Platonism and a champion of Christianity against the intellectualized Platonism in which he once lived. And who better to attack paganism than a former pagan himself? As an expert on Platonism, Augustine at points masterfully argued for the opposite. Heidegger even mentions Pascal once in his magnum opus Being and Time:
"It is to the credit of phenomenological research that it has once again created a clearer view of these phenomena. Not only that; Scheler, taking up Augustine's and Pascal's impulses in particular, has directed the problem to the foundational connections between the 'imagining' and 'interest-taking' acts. Of course, even here the existential-ontological foundations of the act phenomenon in general remain obscure."
Heidegger sees Augustine as a beacon of existential thought in Western philosophy, particularly how individual existence and the self's relationship to the divine are intertwined in the struggle between spiritual enlightenment and self-deception. In the context of Heidegger's critique, Pascal represents a continuation of Augustine's existential and phenomenological focus on the human condition, especially in terms of thrownness—the way in which humans find themselves "thrown" into existence without fully understanding their situation. Pascal's exploration of the "infinite abyss" within human beings that only God can fill echoes Augustine's focus on the inadequacy of worldly knowledge and the need for divine grace. For Heidegger, both thinkers offer a rich existential insight into human experience that contrasts with the more rationalistic approaches of a cold reading of Descartes and scholasticism.
Pascal's Pensées clearly resonate with Augustine's introspective and confessional approach, especially in their shared emphasis on human finitude, mood, and existence, the restlessness of the human heart, and the limitations of human reason. Pascal's Wager reflects Augustine's concern with the human inability to grasp divine truths through reason alone, necessitating a turn to faith and grace. But this is, of course, only the Christian position, not a single philosophical thread that can be drawn from Augustine to Pascal. Heidegger argues that these temptations of pure rationalism, and the lack of self-consciousness it engenders, lead to a state of spiritual alienation in which the world of the self becomes detached from the larger sense of divine reality. Ultimately, this self-centered existence results in a loss of self, where the individual becomes distant from true spiritual insight and fulfillment. He concludes that overcoming these temptations leads to greater self-knowledge and spiritual insight, but succumbing to them leads to spiritual failure and self-destruction.
Heidegger, in his 1921 work Augustine and Neoplatonism, agrees with Pascal that the idea of true, absolute rationality cannot exist because logic requires metaphysics to function:
"Vita" (life) is not a mere word, not a formal concept, but a structural context that Augustin himself saw, albeit with insufficient conceptual acuity. This has not been achieved even today, because the consideration of the self as a basic phenomenon has been taken in a different, downward direction by Descartes, from which the whole of modern philosophy has not been able to escape. Self-consciousness and self-hood in Augustine's sense is something quite different from the Cartesian evidence of the “cogito”. Cf. de civitate Dei lib. XI, c. 26ff. Following the dogma of the Trinity, Augustine considers the human being. (Cf. the treatise de trinitate.) We find in ourselves an image of that supreme Trinity, for: (quamdiu futurum sit), whether being will not one day diminish.
Self-certainty must be interpreted from factual existence, it is only possible from faith. Methodologically, it is important that this evidence must not be taken as detached, that would be a waste. The evidence of the cogito is there, but it must be founded in the factual. For every science, too, ultimately depends on factual existence."
In §29 of Being and Time, Heidegger discusses the concept of Befindlichkeit, often translated as "state of mind" or "attunement," which is essential to his understanding of Dasein (human existence). Heidegger argues that disposition is not merely an emotional state, but an existential structure that reveals how Dasein finds itself in the world, not through intellectual perception, but through moods. These moods are not merely psychological phenomena; they reveal the fundamental condition of Dasein's existence—its "thrownness" into the world, a term Heidegger uses to describe how human beings already find themselves in a particular situation or context without having chosen it.
Pascal's existential exploration of human nature, his focus on the inquiétude (restlessness) of the human heart, and his understanding of the "infinite abyss" within each person that only God can fill resonate with Heidegger's idea of Dasein's attunement to the world. Pascal's reflections on the misery and grandeur of human existence, his emphasis on the precariousness of life and the necessity of faith, resonate with existentialism's Thrownness. Heidegger emphasizes that moods reveal the "there" (Da) of Dasein—its situation in the world. Moods such as fear, joy, or boredom do not arise from an internal psychological state, but are rooted in Dasein's being in the world. They show how existence is thrown into the world and reveal the burden or lightness of being, without necessarily explaining the "why" of these feelings. For Heidegger, moods open the world to us and shape our understanding of ourselves and the world, even if that understanding is often unconscious or evasive. For both thinkers, reason is insufficient to address the fundamental questions of existence. Instead, it is through moods (for Heidegger) or a deeper sense of existential dependence (for Pascal) that the truth of being is revealed. Both Pascal and Heidegger explore how human beings are constantly "thrown" into situations where they must confront their own limitations and the mystery of existence, with Pascal's Christian existentialism focusing on divine grace as the ultimate answer, and Heidegger's existential phenomenology remaining more secular and open-ended. Heidegger recognized the problems of Cartesian rationality but never proposed a solution, as Nietzsche did with his will-to-power and trans-humanism. In his early Woodland Paths (or “Log Paths”, depending on the translation), Heidegger muses:
"The reversal of being without protection is a reversal of being conscious and that within the sphere of consciousness. The sphere of the invisible and the inner determines the essence of being without protection, but also the way of its turning into the farthest periphery. Thus, the one to which the inner and invisible must turn in order to find its essence, can only be the most invisible of the invisible and the innermost of the inner. In modern metaphysics, the sphere of the invisible inside is determined as the area of the presence of the calculated objects. Descartes characterizes this sphere as the consciousness of the ego cogito.
Almost simultaneously with Descartes, Pascal discovers the logic of the heart in contrast to the logic of calculating reason."
The Medieval-Aristotelian Worldview within Western Christian Apologetics
"All of Newton's philosophy necessarily leads to the knowledge of a supreme Being, who created everything, who arranged everything freely. For if, according to Newton (and according to reason) the world is finite, if there is a vacuum, then matter does not necessarily exist, it has therefore received its existence from a free cause. If matter gravitates, as it is demonstrated, it does not gravitate by its nature, as well as it is extended by its nature: it has therefore received gravitation from God. If the planets turn in one direction rather than another, in a non-resistant space, the hand of their creator has therefore directed their course in this direction with absolute freedom. The so-called physical principles of Descartes do not lead the mind to the knowledge of its Creator. God forbid that I should accuse this great man of having disregarded the supreme intelligence to which he owed so much, and which had raised him above almost all the men of his century! I only say that the abuse he sometimes made of his mind led his disciples to precipices from which the master was far removed; I say that the Cartesian system produced that of Spinosa; I say that I have known many people whom Cartesianism led to admit no other God than the immensity of things, and that I have not seen, on the contrary, any Newtonian who was not a theist in the most rigorous sense."
— Voltaire, 1738 Elements of the Philosophy of Newton
Aristotle's works were rediscovered in the medieval West in the 12th century through Arabic translations and commentaries, and they became the foundation of scholastic thought. His contributions to logic, metaphysics, ethics, and natural science were integrated into the intellectual culture of the time. Aristotelian metaphysics, especially the concepts of substance, form, matter, and causality, became central to medieval philosophy and shaped the way thinkers approached both philosophical and theological questions. The Scholastics sought to use reason (i.e. Aristotelian logic) to explain and defend Christian doctrines. Their goal was to synthesize this understanding of "reason" and revelation to show that theological beliefs had a rational (i.e. Aristotelian) basis. The scholastic method relied on dialectical reasoning, the rigorous analysis of arguments and counterarguments to reconcile conflicting views. This method emphasized detailed debate and applied logic to theology in the belief that reason could clarify and support faith.
Descartes rejected the Scholastics' reliance on inherited authorities such as Aristotle and introduced his method of radical (or systematic) doubt. Whereas the Scholastics sought to clarify existing beliefs through logical argumentation, Descartes sought to strip away uncertain beliefs and rebuild knowledge from a foundation of certainty. He also radically redefined the concept of substance, introducing substance dualism, which divided reality into two distinct substances: mind (thinking substance) and body (extended substance). This was a significant departure from Aristotelian metaphysics, reducing the complexity of scholastic categories to a sharp division between the mental and physical realms.
This gave room for certainty in scientific pursuits. Descartes was particularly critical of the scholastic-Aristotelian understanding of physics. He rejected their teleological explanations (the idea that natural processes are directed towards a purpose or end) in favor of a mechanistic view of the natural world. In Descartes’ mechanistic universe, physical phenomena are explained purely in terms of matter and motion, without reference to any inherent purposes or final causes, which were central to Aristotelian physics. This systematic doubt applied to the physical world founded science as we know it—yet, it created the preconditions for Nihilism.
This replacement of Middle and Neoplatonic metaphysics seen in the Logos-Theology of the New Testament had massive implications for Western Christianity. In Scholastic Christianity, especially in Aquinas' metaphysics, God was transcendent and the First Cause and sustainer of the universe. But Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian causality (efficient, material, formal, and final causes) with Christian theology—applying Techne to God for the first time within Christianity. In other words, for the first time God was "bound" by Justice, Time, and other abstract concepts—a view that the Apostolic fathers and early church fathers condemned as heretical and codified in the Nicene creed. Early theologians emphasized God's absolute immutability (unchanging nature) in contrast to the Pagan view of God being a "thing-in-itself". God was seen as completely separate from the created world, existing beyond time, space, and change within early Christianity. This is particularly evident in Athanasius' defense of the Nicene creed, where he emphasizes the consubstantiality (same substance) of the Father and the Son, reflecting the eternal, unchanging nature of the divine being. This Judeo-Christian concept is in sharp contrast to the Pagan gods, all of whom were "bound" by something—locality, temporality, or abstract concepts. The immutability of God was a fundamental difference between Christianity and Paganism, but in the Scholastics, this difference was broken down through the odd worship of a pagan philosopher—Aristotle.
So while the Scholastics argued that God is both immanent in creation (by sustaining it) and transcendent (existing beyond it), Aquinas also described God as pure act (actus purus), meaning that God’s essence is identical to His existence—a seismic shift away from the teachings of the Apostles. God is the unmoved mover, but His immanence in the world is realized through causality (i.e., Techne). For the first time in the history of Judeo-Christian Theology, God had to obey the rules of consciousness, space, time, and whatever else human perception is limited by. God became a “Thing” in Thomist Scholasticism.
This Scholasticism laid the foundation for movements such as Jansenism within the Catholic church, but also is wired into the foundation of Protestantism. Calvinism (like Jansenism), views God as bound to his nature—specifically Justice. Likewise, various Protestant movements such as the Jehovah's Witnesses adopted this Pagan body-soul understanding view of the Scholastics, and Molenists, Arminians, Thomists, Compatibilists, and Open Theists all rely on this Medieval Catholic Aristotelian metaphysics in that God "must" act through Techne (Newtonian Time, Justice, etc.). The self-deceptive "non-denominational," "non-Catholic Christian," "non-essentialist," "simply Christian" low-church Fundamentalists are as Thomist in the metaphysics as a Roman Catholic; they are all cut from this same metaphysical cloth. God is not fully transcendent in the Western Christian understanding, because Scholasticism collapsed the Apostolic Energy-Essence distinction. To the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox who maintain this Hellenized Jewish 1st century understanding of Metaphysics found in the New Testament, this Catholic and Protestant denial of the absolute immutability (explicitly or implicitly) of God through the synthesis of Pagan philosophy in the Middle Ages is a foundational flaw that drives all other heresies found in both modern Roman Catholicism and in the kaleidoscope of the 30,000 denominations of Protestantism. After the codification of Scholastic metaphysics and the rejection of the Patristics in Vatican II and the total de-evolution of Protestantism into vague, individualistic Fundamentalism, hope for unity with the East is even more of a pipe dream. Christos Yannaras notes the problem with the Scholastic influence in the West and the difference between Orthodoxy and the Catholic-Protestant continuum:
"The West's difference from the ecclesial Hellenic tradition lies in the following: The West makes existing different from being related, and takes relation as a property-capacity that characterizes only certain existents (a mark of recognition of rational beings), whereas ecclesial Hellenism recognizes existence as an event of active relations—it identifies existence with relation.
The understanding that I personally draw from the testimony of ecclesial experience is that existing in itself constitutes an act of relation. I do not first exist and then subsequently come into relation; I exist because I am related. Faith (trust) in God is an experience of relation, not an intellectual certainty. Relation begins with the discovery of his personal otherness in the beauty and wisdom of sensible reality—in the same way that we discover a painter through his painting and a composer through his music. And this knowledge that is conveyed by the relation has the constantly perfected, and never fully realized, dynamic of erotic love. The question "Do you believe in God?" means (at least in the Greek language): "Do you trust him?" And to trust him, you must know him, at least from his work, in the degree required to win your confidence.
Arguments for and against the existence of God refer to individual 'beliefs,' ideological views, and psychological choices, not to the knowledge of God. They keep us on an infantile level—I would venture to say that 'philosophy of religion', if it poses such a problem of arguments for and against, is pure childishness. Any attempt to promote the Thomistic rejection of the distinction between the essence and the energies of the essence, to replace the empirical realism of this distinction with an intellectualistic Aristotelian version of God's essence as 'pure action', nullifies the pragmatic character of the ecclesial experience and witness. The case of man (the image of God) adequately clarifies the ontological difference reflected in the distinction between essence and the energies of essence: every human being possesses thought, judgment, imagination, will and desire, as well as the capacity for bipedal movement, laughter, and so on. All of these traits are characteristics of every human being; they determine the common nature of human existence, and they define the essence of humanity."
Life Affirming Rationalism
Blaise Pascal's philosophical legacy revolves around his aphoristic integration of faith, reason, and existential reflection, based on his unique synthesis of Augustinian theology and a critique of Cartesian rationalism. Pascal emphasized the inadequacy of human reason to grasp divine truths without metaphysical foundations, noting that reason alone, without the intervention of faith, leads to existential despair—a prophetic declaration which even Nietzsche admired. We are still in a crisis of meaning brought on by Scholasticism's collapse of the Energies-Essence distinction and the Nihilism that is the inevitable result. Pascal was a close confidant of Descartes, so his critique has a unique dynamic absent from later thinkers. He critiqued Descartes' reductionist view of God as a mere certifier of rationality from an authoritative perspective: a friend of Descartes. Pascal's Pensées, published in many different formats over the centuries, has been an influential collection of these thoughts. Despite Nietzsche's disdain for Pascal's submission to faith, he recognized Pascal's rough and untrained intellectual power, calling him "the only logical Christian." For Pascal, the answer to human misery lay in faith and the recognition of divine grace, an idea diametrically opposed to the Cartesian quest for absolute certainty through reason alone. Perhaps one of the greatest eulogies to Pascal is in Tolstoy's summary of Pascal's works from the 1919 Path of Life:
"One's own will is never satisfied, even if all its demands are fulfilled. But if you give it up—your will—you are immediately satisfied. Living for one's will, one is always dissatisfied; renouncing it, one cannot but be completely satisfied. The only true virtue is self-hatred, because every man is worthy of hatred by his lustfulness. By hating himself, one seeks a being worthy of love. But since we cannot love anything outside of us, we are compelled to love a being that would be in us but would not be us, and such a being can be only one—the universal being. The kingdom of God is in us (Luke XVII, 21); the universal good is in us, but it is not us.
Pascal says that if we saw ourselves in a dream in the same position all the time, and in reality in different positions, we would consider the dream to be reality and reality to be a dream. This is not quite fair. Reality differs from a dream in that in actual life we have our ability to act in accordance with our moral requirements; in a dream, however, we often know that we are committing abominable and immoral acts that are not peculiar to us, and we cannot help ourselves. So, rather, we should say that if we did not know a life in which we were more powerful in satisfying moral demands than in a dream, we would regard the dream as quit life, and would never doubt that it was not real life. Now our whole life from birth to death, with its dreams, is not in turn a dream, which we take for reality, for real life, and in the reality of which we do not doubt only because we do not know a life in which our freedom to follow the moral demands of the soul would be even greater than that which we now possess.
When truth is expressed by man, it does not mean that this truth comes from man. All truth is from God. It only passes through man. If it passes through this man and not another man, it is only because that man has succeeded in making himself so transparent that truth can pass through him.
Some people seek the good in power, others in curiosity, in the sciences, and others in pleasure. These three kinds of longings have formed three different schools, and all philosophers have always followed any one of the three. Those who came closest to true philosophy realized that the common good, the object of the aspirations of all men, should not consist in any of the private things which can be possessed by only one and which, when divided, rather distress their possessor by the absence of the missing part than give pleasure to the part which belongs to him. They realized that the true good must be such that it can be possessed by all at once, without diminishing it and without envy, and that no one can lose it against his will. And the good is this: the good is in love."
Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point