Blaise Pascal and the Anxiety of FaithEmmanuel Falque
Abstract. — This article examines the anxiety inherent to Christian faith through the life and work of Blaise Pascal. Against the suspicion of Heidegger and others that Christianity covers up or ignores the anxiety of finitude, this article argues that Pas-cal shows how it maintains the experience of anxiety and even deals with additional dimensions of anxiety. Post-conversion, the believer seeks to remain in relation to God and worries about the possibility of separation from God. In this article, dif-ferent kinds of anxiety are identified in Pascal’s own changing interpretation of his conversion found in the differences between his writing La conversion du pécheur (1653), and, in particular, the paper and parchment versions of his famous testa-ment, the Mémorial (1654). While the experience of peace remains an important part of Christian experience, the challenge in post-conversion is how to remain in belief amidst a restlessness that is integral to faith – at least in its eschatological mode.
Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te – “our heart is restless until it rests in you.”1 Augustine’s well-known formula at the beginning of the Confessions opens the tradition to the “anxious heart” (cor in-quietum), in which man, but also the Son of Man, “has no place to rest his head.”2 The human is certainly troubled over the divine, but the divine is also troubled over the human. An anxiety of the created inner-vates the very movement of giving one’s self, wherein the concerns of humanity also become those of God. There is a sharing of humanity,
* This text has been presented at a seminar at the Interfaculty Centre for Catho-lic Thought of the KU Leuven, October 5, 2018. It is a translation by Jacob Benjamins of the original French, which has been published as: Emmanuel Falque, “Pascal et l’inquiétude de la foi,” in Jean Greisch, les trois ages de la raison: Metaphysique, phenomenologique, hermeneutique. Actes du colloque de Cerisy, ed. S. Bancalari, J. de Gra-mont, J. Leclercq (Paris: Hermann, 2016), 255-279.
Translation note: Inquietude is translated as “anxiety” throughout the text. This places the essay within a philosophical context associated with Heidegger’s claim that Christians cannot live before the anxiety of death because they co-apperceive life in death – a claim the author seeks to challenge.
1. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1991), 64.
2. Mt 8:20.
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which could not be entirely saved if it were not totally assumed. Every-thing depends then, to tell the truth, on that which will be called “anx-iety” or “restlessness” (in-quies). Where some (Augustine) will see a negative determination, thinking that immobility is better than mobility, or that arrival at the port is more significant than the voyage; others (Blaise Pascal) will prefer the incessant whirling in which the human being seems to be forever carried away, remaining in constant movement until he arrives. If there is therefore an “instability” to be understood from Saint Augustine to Pascal, it will be “white” or “black” according to whether it is considered in the order of creation or from the point of view of sin: “white instability” from wonder at the passing time, weaved from the diversity of creation in its different movements and leading to praise (darkness, water, wind, fire, smoke, the animals who crawl and those who fly, quadrupeds, bipeds, etc.).3 And “black instability,” from the more tragic picture of the impermanence of things. Black instability is related to the thought of death and the non-meaning of existence, leading if not to despondency at least to the believer’s despair or peni-tence.4 But where Augustine still consecrated the white without sacrific-ing the black, conserving praise to creation even with an anxious heart, Pascal will crush the black without seeing white on his side. He will begin first with the tragic (“misery of man without God”) and then, eventually, save him by a certain ethics (“happiness of man with God”). It is necessary to emphasize with Philippe Sellier:
Pascal completely passed over these happy depictions (from Augus-tine). He borrows from his predecessor only the most gloomy images: the heavy waters of the river, which mingled with the fan-tastic sulphurous glow and glaucous darkness, and whose course is bordered by frail creatures who will soon roll in this steaming mud. All this in an oppressive silence!5
Briefly, the issue is clear but important enough to be recalled. The thaumazein or astonishment of the Greeks, which could certainly still designate a certain mode of “wonder” or “admiration” from Plato to Augustine or Saint Francis of Assisi, will radically transform itself in the “stupor” or “fear” of Pascal’s account. Disorder rather than praise becomes the heuristic mode by which to begin, whether it is sin, certainly, but also
3. Ps 104 (103).4. Ps 51 (50). Philippe Sellier, Pascal et saint Augustin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991),
20-38, see especially: “La fluidité nocturne du monde” (ibid., 20-21). This double insta-bility is resumed in Jean Rousset, Anthologie de la poesie française (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), 6-9.
5. Sellier, Pascal et saint Augustin, 25.
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our simple metaphysical being-here in pain that needs to be stopped: “What sort of freak then is man,” acutely asks the thinker from Port Royal, “How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe! Who will unravel such a tangle?”6
Therefore, engaging with the “bile,” or privileging rather the black instability (the tragic of the flow) over white instability (the wonder of movement), the seventeenth century will thus discover a native figure of anxiety – less this time in the desire for rest rooted in being created (Augustine) than in a whirling humanity no longer having a “fixed point” on which to cling (Pascal). We will thus distinguish, following the thinker of Port Royal, three types of anxiety according to whether one takes the view from the man tout court, the becoming of the world, or the life of the believer: either the anxiety of what we are before death (metaphysical anxiety), the anxiety of being turned away from oneself in diversion (spiritual anxiety), and the anxiety of the believer with respect to sin or one’s own possibility of falling (anxiety of salvation). In addition to the anxiety over those who falsely claim to “not fear death” (Seneca), or the one who proves to be incapable of “remaining at rest” (in-quies) in a room,7 there is an anxiety born in Pascal that is properly Christian and all the more obvious because it imposes an additional responsibility on him. If there is indeed an anxiety of humanity “without” God (the unavoidability of death or a world indifferent to the divine), paradoxi-cally one discovers an even greater anxiety at the heart of the confessing philosopher’s experience – that of the human being “with” God (unbind-ing [deliaison] or the possibility of sin). The believer, to put it literally, redoubles anxiety at the moment of belief or in the act of belief. Because it is not enough to face his possible annihilation (metaphysical anxiety) or a world of unbelief (spiritual anxiety), he must also interrogate within himself the eventual rupture of his union [alliance] (anxiety of sin). Rather than ascend to a presumed certainty that “believing” or “loving” would be a definitively acquired gift, on the contrary, it is up to him to know that which was conferred to him can be removed from him since it was previously and freely given to him. Anyone who ties a knot rec-ognizes the threat of its loosening at the very moment of tightening it. Sin or the horizon of “separation” reach the depths of anxiety in Pascal
6. L. 131/B. 434. Translation used for all the quotes in this article: Blaise Pascal, Pensees, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Books, 1995).
7. L. 136/B. 139.
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(anxiety of sin), even if the anxiety of human beings “tout court” and their ineluctable death will constitute here the pedestal on which it comes to graft itself (anxiety of finitude). I have already noted as a first step in my book Le passeur de Gethsemani what I will aim to deepen in this article, that “the anxiety of sin” takes a stand on the anxiety of fini-tude, “like an army that conquers a previously neutral territory without ever having been the sole cause of the battle.”8
The “anxiety of faith” for the sinner who converts in La conversion du pecheur (the end of 1653) in the thinker from Port Royal, thus turns into “anxiety in faith” for the Christian undergoing a test from God, all the while fearing the loss of him in the experience of the Memorial (November 1654). Anxiety over death, anxiety for the world, and anxi-ety over sin are not opposed to each other here. Finitude, libertinism, and sin form a whole, but this time in the 17th century, the loss of self (in sin) takes precedence over the diversion of the world (distraction) and the destruction of the ego (death). To not “feel your coming death” – such is the real anxiety of the classical age, which is far removed from the “I do not feel like dying” that is desired, even demanded, today. For what matters is not whether one dies or not since everyone will die, nor is it to suffer or not suffer since, at least in the 17th century, everyone will suffer. Rather, what matters is preparing to die, that is to say not remaining in a state of sin at the moment of “passing.” Such claims could certainly make people smile today, in particular, the conscious expectation of death against the self-forgetfulness so desired nowadays at the time of death. Nothing is worse in this “century of salvation” than dying without having seen it or known it, fearing both death in sleep as well as accidental death – hence the justified importance in this period, as perhaps in all periods, of extreme-unction, even baptism, at the moment of passing. Still, this requirement of “prepared” death could also teach us about the responsibility of the believer, “redoubling” in anxiety precisely as soon as he is attached to God, and therefore no longer living solely “for himself.” Like the enigma of conjugality, one knows oneself and feels oneself especially more “connected” when the possibility of being or becoming “separated” looms on the horizon. This “fidelity,” whether divine or human, is not only the result of an “oath”
8. Emmanuel Falque, Le passeur de Gethsemani: Angoisse, souffrance et mort (Paris: Cerf, 1999), 47-54. See especially: “The temptation of despair or the anxiety of sin” (50). ET: The Guide to Gethsemane: Anxiety, Suffering, Death, trans. G. Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 23. Reprinted in Emmanuel Falque, Triduum philosophique: Passeur de Gethsemani. Metamorphose de la finitude. Noces de l’agneau (Paris: Cerf, 2015), 54.
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held by the past, but is a gift to reiterate each day: “Certainly no one would believe,” Karl Barth emphasizes in the Introduction to Evangelical Theology, “if he maintained that he ‘had’ faith, so that nothing was lack-ing to him, and that he ‘could’ believe.”9
I. From the Anxiety of Death to the Anxiety of Sin
Certainly Pascal, and probably as a pioneer, dares to consider death as a true death. Christianity delivers neither the right nor the privilege of escaping the anxiety of finitude: “The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished for ever.”10 As I have argued before, this is contrary to Heidegger’s famous and false assertion that Christians cannot live the anxiety of death having always already “co-apperceived” death in the interpretation of life.11 Thus, in Pascalian anthropology, we will first find a figure of the “human being tout court” leading, for once, not to undo the whole Christian from the rest and the entirety of humanity: “death alone is certain” (sola mors certa est) exclaims Augustine,12 “All I know is that I must soon die,” responds Pascal like an echo.13 Metaphysical anxiety is therefore born with regard to death first, and it is the entire merit of Pascal following Epictetus and Montaigne, bending however the “rest-lessness” (in-quies) in an endless whirlwind as long as an Other, or another life, will not come to assure me of that which by myself, I will never be able to find.
Rather than death (anxiety of finitude) alone, it is also and never-theless after-death or eternity that principally worries Pascal (anxiety of sin). He now prohibits undoing the solidarity “of” redemption, or fini-tude “of” the fault: “religion teaches us that through one man all was
9. Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, trans. Grover Foley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1967), 104. “Whoever believes, knows and confesses that he cannot ‘by his own understanding and power’ in any way believe. He will simply perform this believing, without losing sight of the unbelief that continually accompanies him and makes itself felt” (ibid.).
10. L. 165/B. 210.11. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 2010), 239. A formula which I consider in The Guide to Gethsemane, having no other ambition than to answer to it (Falque, The Guide to Gethsemane, 1). The citation on death is in Sellier, Pascal et saint Augustin, 26.
12. “Sancti Aurelii Augustini sermones ad populum,” Sermo 97,3,3, vol. 1, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini opera omnia tom. V, pars prior (Paris: Migne, 1841), col. 589-591; col. 590.
13. L. 427/B. 194.
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lost and the bond broken between God and man, and that through one man the bond was restored. We are born so opposed to this love of God, which is necessary for us, that we must be born guilty or God would be unjust.”14 To say, following the famous fragment on diversion, “We burn with desire to find a firm footing” or “our whole foundation cracks and the earth opens up into the depth of the abyss,”15 certainly amounts to recognizing the metaphysical instability of the human being (diversion of the self and the prospect of death), but also and especially, at least in Pascal, to consider it in the framework of another and still larger anxiety, that of salvation (grace and sin). The first metaphysical and anthropo-logical perspective of Pascalian anxiety makes distraction a proper mode of being human (diversion), but not without linking it to the fall as a possibility for any believer (sin).
Thus, two times are to be distinguished, but without ever ceasing to conjoin them: the one by which a person loses herself or feels lost (diversion or the horizon of death [anxiety of finitude]), and the one by which she finds herself or rediscovers herself because God finds her there (access to the self by Jesus Christ [anxiety of sin]). The “destitution of the ego” in Pascal never goes without the “new institution of the self” in God and by God. Neither diversion nor the fear of death have an exclu-sively philosophical meaning (in relation to humanity) if they are not at the same time related to their theological aim (in relation to God). We only truly recognize that we are lost when an “other” finds us or that we are fallen when “someone” comes to pick us up.
In the double horizon of both philosophy and theology, “diversion” or the “non-worry of anxiety” is not only about getting lost or falling, but on the contrary, sincerely not knowing that we get lost and that we therefore fall. If the human being is always anxious for Pascal, it is obvi-ously not because being worried is better than being at rest. Instead, it is because whoever is not anxious, or more, is anxious all the more because he is not anxious, believes himself to be at rest even though he is moving and thinks he has arrived even when he has not even begun. The anxiety of death, but also and even more yet the anxiety of sin, no longer touches the “distracted man” who is busy doing everything pre-cisely in order to “not think about it” and therefore forgets that another “way” or “someone else” is still possible: “It is not that they really bring happiness, nor that anyone imagines that true bliss comes from possess-ing the money to be won at gaming or the hare that is hunted: no one
14. L. 205/B. 489.15. L. 199/B. 72.
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would take it as a gift… but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us.”16
A phenomenology of diversion thus precedes the theology of being lost in Pascal, and an anthropology of heaviness founds the economy of salva-tion. Contrary to the contemporary interpretation, we do not pass directly from philosophy to theology in the thinker from Port Royal, forgetting along the way where we come from (humanity) and where we go (God) – nor, moreover, do we jump immediately from the order of the flesh to the order of the spirit, or from the order of spirit to the order of charity.17 Still, it is necessary to accept that we remain in each state and cross from one side to another. By way of dividing the orders, I have shown elsewhere, we have forgotten how their relationship is one of anticipation rather than opposition, of figuration more than of separation. The biblical and prophetic model of proclamation (the relationship of two testaments) takes precedence over the Hellenistic one of division or of recomposition (soul and body), and it is because we have forgotten that we raised charity by omitting the part of it that also belongs to our common humanity: “The elitism of the third order, which is called ‘love’ but generally excludes philosophers on account of their ‘thinking’, for-gets the essential character of the human per se, known in the prefigura-tion and continuity of genus’s rather than in the opposition of classes.”18
“Astray” (philosophy), then “fallen” (theology), both are the two perspectives to be considered. Astray, or, “[a] nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to nothing, a middle point between all and nothing,” humanity remains here “infinitely remote from an understand-ing of the extremes.” Even better, since he himself cannot reach or follow this astonishing approach, “[t]he author of these wonders understands them: no one else can.”19 As human being “tout court” therefore, a per-son understands at least one thing, knowledge that she does not under-stand, or rather, not to derive a non-Pascalian apophatism or an anti-rationalism here, she understands that she will not understand on her own. Far from not understanding, nor from never embracing the uni-verse, perhaps on the contrary she will reach it, but only in that she is then, or always already, “in” the One who holds everything – “Jesus
16. L. 136/B. 139. 17. L. 308/B. 793.18. See my book Passer le Rubicon: Philosophie et theologie. Essai sur les frontières
(Brussels: Lessius, 2013), especially 180-183: “The illusion of the leap” (ibid., 182). ET: Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology, trans. R. Shank (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 261.
19. L. 199/B. 72 (disproportion of man).
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Christ” in person and in her person: “we know ourselves only through Jesus Christ.”20 So the question is not about understanding or not understanding, any more than it is about being lost or not lost, falling or not falling. To grasp, to lose oneself, to fall, it is of little importance once we grasp that we do not grasp, see that we are lost, and that we have fallen in order to get back up. “What, then, will man become?” asks Pascal. “Who cannot see from all this that man is lost, that he has fallen from his place, that he anxiously seeks it, and cannot find it again?”21 Man “does not know the place he should occupy,” insists the thinker from Port Royal with lucidity, “[h]e has obviously gone astray; he has fallen from his true place and cannot find it again. He searches every-where, anxiously but in vain, in the midst of impenetrable darkness.”22
As for the “fall,” it also awaits its metaphysical and anthropological treatment and then becomes “theological.” Clearly “gone astray and fallen from his true place” in addition to having “lost his place,” man is not only “frightened by infinite spaces” from a cosmological point of view,23 but by this he discovers himself this time theologically as the subject or victim of a “non-place,” in the double meaning of the French ‘non-lieu’ of an acquitted case and an unspecified topos. Having forgot-ten his “fixed point” held in the divine, he resolves himself to the human and in his sin breaks all relation to transcendence. Whereas God was “an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere” in Alain de Lille and therefore in the Middle Ages, nature itself takes the place and title of this “sphere” and of this “centre” in Pascal, and there-fore in modernity: “nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is every-where and circumference nowhere.”24 In this symptomatic displacement of a changing world and epoch, not only does nature substitute itself for God in a false accusation of pantheism here, but also and above all the “lost cosmology of a true place for man” accompanies an “anthropo-logical and theological self-forgetfulness” which was his “true place” in the universe, namely, “in” God.
With Blaise Pascal and the “misery of man without God,” moder-nity is opened to a new mode of anxiety – that of not knowing where
20. L. 417/B. 548: “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves by Jesus Christ; we only know life, death, by Jesus-Christ. Outside of Christ we do not know our life, nor our death, nor our God, nor ourselves” (my emphasis).
21. L. 430/B. 431.22. L. 400/B. 427.23. L. 199/B. 72.24. Ibid.
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to go (“eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end”),25 but also and especially the anxiety of never stopping: “fallen from his place” or from his “true place,” namely, “God” or rather the Word “in whom” we are,26 the human being knows neither where nor how to retrieve it this time. It is not sufficient to notice we have gone “astray,” rather we must recognize that at times we are definitively fallen – incapable of getting back up or imagining a place to return to if “another” does not come to find us or indicate it to us. The “fall” like the “weight of gravity,” cannot be taken away from us, unless my love for God or rather his love for me can otherwise orient me, thus thwart-ing the most ordinary laws of gravity and therefore also sin: “A body by its weight tends to move towards its proper place. The weight’s move-ment is not necessarily downwards, but to its appropriate position.” We read in Augustine’s Confessions which Pascal remembers having read: “[F]ire tends to move upwards, a stone downwards. They are acted on by their respective weights; they seek their own place […] (But) [m]y weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.”27 With Augustine and Blaise Pascal following him, we “fall” in a kind of opposite direction or walk in a forbidden way – with God only. “My weight is my love” (amor meus amor pondus), in that I weigh less “with God” (cum Deo) than “without God” (sine Deo), or in this way he carries me when I believe I am making my way.
It remains, however, that such a “physics of contraries,” where “heaviness” becomes “light” and vice versa, is not alone sufficient to combat or reverse the curve of sin. It is still necessary to weigh “with God” the double weight of love (pondus) as well as my fault (onus), by which he came to join me if not to save me, at least not to abandon me. To accept being carried away by the weight of your own depths – “weight of love” (pondus) or “weight of sin” (onus) is not important28 – this, I would argue, is the meaning of despair and even despondency understood by Pascal in his Pensees. The “therapeutic of fear” put in place in the fragment on two infinites29 aims to not only disorient us so
25. L. 199/B. 72.26. Col 1:15-18.27. Augustine, Confessions XIII,11,10, trans. Chadwick, 278. I refer to this point
in my chapter, “Après la métaphysique? Le poids de la vie selon saint Augustin,” in Après la metaphysique: Augustin?, Actes du colloque de l’Institut d’etudes medievales (ICP, Paris), ed. A. de Libera (Paris: Vrin, 2013), 111-128.
28. The dual meaning of “weight” as pondus, which raises (weight of love) or onus which lowers (weight of sin) is demonstrated in my aforementioned article “Le poids de la vie selon saint Augustin.”
29. L. 199/B. 72.
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that we turn to the “author of these wonders” who has also created us (lectio facilior of diversion), but rather seeks to make us descend into our own “depths” from where God alone will know if not how to extract us, then at least to live “with us” (lectio difficilior of turning to one’s own ipseity): “Instability. It is a horrible thing to feel all we possess slipping away.”30
II. The Anxiety of Faith or the Salutary Disorder
Therefore, if Blaise Pascal described, perhaps for the first time, a true anxiety of finitude (death) coupled with the anxiety of sin (separation), it is then “of” faith and “in” faith that anxiety or non-rest receives its most proper and forceful meaning. In other words, where “diversion” or the “anxiety of non-anxiety” has led us from the “anxiety of death” to the “anxiety of sin,” it now follows that we consider this impossible sup-pression of anxiety from sin at least here-below, including and especially if we live “with” God. Certainly, anxiety will not be the same according to whether or not one confesses the divine, some people thinking that eternity suppresses finiteness and belief libertinage. The fact remains that the one who believes is not more comfortable, far from it. Because to be “attached,” as I have said, means that we run the risk of being “unbound,” and to “receive” means that we must also expect that nothing, suddenly, can be “given” to us. Faith without assurance is probably the sole assur-ance of faith – this goes against the claim one has at times falsely made that faith would allow us to safeguard our being from being always and necessarily “in danger.”31
It has been wrongly believed that having or receiving faith is enough to put an end to death by eternity, to end distraction by certainty or the fall by salvation. But it is not enough and it is a bad understanding of Pascal as well as the mystery of redemption. Nothing could be less true (and this will be our lectio difficilior here) than to believe that by faith one has arrived – or to claim that “rest” (in-quies) is the only way for one to be more advantageously protected against danger. On the con-trary, believing could redouble anxiety, as I have said, rather than feeling
30. L. 752/B. 212. 31. On this point I refer to the work of Jean-Yves Lacoste, Être en danger (Paris:
Cerf, 2011), 8: “by his donation, the being is in danger,” with its just resumption: “Is man at peace satisfied with peace? No response is possible here that does not perceive in peacefulness and anxiety, not two antagonistic phenomena, but two moments of a single experience” (ibid., 283) (translation JB).
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or thinking that one is secure: “But where there is danger, there grows also what saves,” recalled Hölderlin, in a quasi-secularized version of St. Paul (“where sin increased, grace increased all the more,” Rm 5:20).32 Here stands the precise meaning of the “conversion of the sinner” for Pascal. He consecrates the anxiety “of” faith at the moment of belief, or preparing “to” believe as the first leap by which anxiety itself will be redoubled.
With La conversion du pecheur (the end of 1653), one year before the experience of the Memorial (November 1654), a new trouble is born in the soul of the thinker from Port Royal. Here he is less worried about the peace of the one who is not anxious (diversion), than of the anxiety of the one who would come to worry and therefore believe (conversion). One suddenly becomes anxious not from lack of belief, but from seeing that one has not believed even though one could have believed – and thus to leave behind diversion: “this new light (from the conversion) gives the soul fear and brings her a disorder that pierces the rest found in the things which were a delight.”33 The anxiety “of” faith – the fear, even the anxiety “of” belief – such is precisely what his sister Gilberte witnesses in her own brother Blaise when the Lord was leading him to the experience of the Memorial: “he was beginning to feel an extreme aversion to the follies and amusements of the world” (Letter to Gilberte, July 25, 1655). It is well-known, conversion produces aversion and turn-ing back to oneself diverts one from the non-self. But at this point and at this time of this text, rediscovered posthumously and hardly authen-ticated (La conversion du pecheur), Pascal is not yet fully converted, or the experience of “Fire” like the burning bush of Exodus has not yet radically transformed him. Things move and prepare for the cataclysm that will arrive, but this waiting produces in the self, or rather in him, disturbance even over the very idea of changing and of changing himself. We focus on his faults or his false tranquility in La conversion du pecheur (1653), as we also cling to his sickness or his suffering that we have become accustomed to in Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies (1659): “Remove from me then, Lord, begs the patient, the sadness that the love of myself can give me for my own suffering.”34
32. Hölderlin quoted and commented on by Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 2001), 115.
33. Blaise Pascal, “La conversion du pécheur,” in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Seuil, 1963), 290.
34. Blaise Pascal, “Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies,” in Œuvres complètes, 365.
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An anxiety “of” faith is thus born even in the idea of believing (La con-version du pecheur, 1653), which will be later relayed by an anxiety “in” faith itself even at the hour of belief (Memorial, November 1564): we read in a contemporaneous note to the 1653 text: “Conversion: the soul of the sinner is terrified with this consideration, seeing that each moment tears him away from the joy of his goodness and that which is most dear to him flows away from him every moment…”35
The “anxiety of faith” now takes the relay from the “anxiety of finitude.” The anxiety of faith at the moment of belief (“salutary disor-der”), replaces tranquility (diversion) and even the anxiety (death) of the one who does not believe. The anxiety of salvation (faith) radicalizes and changes the meaning of spiritual anxiety (diversion) and metaphysical anxiety (death). We become all the more anxious when we turn from distracting ourselves (diversion), stop relying solely on ourselves (death), and when we call to another (salvation). The “non-anxiety” or the “false tranquility” of the one who does not believe certainly worries – at least worries the one who believes. The “anxiety of facing death” worries us all, believer or not, but it is only self-evident to the self in the horizon of finitude. The “anxiety of salvation” or the possibility of being saved is a concern proper to the believer this time, all the more definitely because only an Other, and He alone, will be able to live with him and pull him in.
Therefore, everything in Pascal is done in order to “worry about non-anxiety” – the self-forgetfulness (diversion) and the horizon of our certain death (finitude) – but also and even more for the possibility of falling and needing to be saved (sin). And once this is done, meaning once we have heard the call of the One who can raise us, we cannot return or retreat, which is precisely all the more “disturbing.” There is always more to fear, to say it one more time, when the “bond” has the possibility of being “broken,” indeed, even of “loving” in the eventuality of becoming “hated.” To go to the “other” is to renounce the self and to renounce the self ends with forbidding us to pass “from” the other. The believer is far from being overly assured or reassured. On the con-trary, in the prism of his “anxious conversion” the sinner will measure his former life to be more “calm” or “peaceful” – even if it was frantic from distractions made only for diversion [di-vertir] or to deflect from his being lost and the possibility of falling: “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it” (L. 166/ B. 183).
35. “La conversion du pécheur,” Preliminary Note, 290.
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Following a series of seven observations the “sinner who converts” will learn, according to Pascal, to progressively pass from an un-anxious soul (diversion), or anxiety of the self only (death), to a faith anxious over an “Other” – the One who will search for him at the risk, on the contrary, of remaining definitively astray, even forsaken (sin). Following such a nomen-clature, the thinker from Port Royal demonstrates by experience or by way of the propaedeutic in the Memorial that life with God has no comfort and no refuge, which would allow us to leave our common humanity. Redoubling anxiety, the “neophyte” could certainly regret having bound himself, if he did not find there the happiness of receiving “this other” in whom he had never hoped: “Jesus Christ himself.” 1) The first observation, therefore, among the seven announced from
La conversion du pecheur: the new anxiety (of faith) traverses and worries the false tranquility supposedly anxious (from diversion), until even the idea of belief becomes that which is the most disturb-ing (salvation). Paradoxically, indicated with precision in La conver-sion du pecheur, “the (converted) soul finds still more bitterness in the exercises of piety than in the vanities of the world.”36 In between or in the “in-between,” the soul sees what she has lost and does not yet know what she has won: “on the one hand, the presence of invis-ible objects touches her more than the hope of the invisible, and on the other, the solidity of the invisible touches her more than the vanity of the visible.”37
2) Second observation: the “nothingness of death” as metaphysical engulfment is translated now as the “nothingness of sin” by way of an ethical break. The “nothingness of truth,” inherited from Saint Bernard, is transformed here in the “nothingness of severity.” The humus or the “nothing” which characterizes human beings in their creaturely state as dependent on God (ontological nothingness) also becomes the place by which they are separated from God and prefer their lives to God’s (ethical nothingness): “It is from this that man begins to consider as nothingness all that must return to nothingness, the heavens, the earth, his spirit, his body, his parents, his friends, his enemies […], honor, ignominy, esteem, contempt, authority, indigence, health, sickness and life itself.”38
3) Third observation: to see the blindness or to discover the error that results from it. The new anxiety (of conversion) denounces the false
36. “La conversion du pécheur,” 290.37. Ibid.38. Ibid.
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tranquility (of diversion) and interrogates every other anxiety (death): “the (converted) soul begins to be surprised by the blindness in which she lived.”39
4) Fourth observation and the most central: a new modern and positive figure of anxiety or of non-rest is born here. This anxiety is no longer uniquely despair or the whirlwind of a person not “finding her place,” but a “salutary disorder” or a “holy confusion.” It is an anxiety in which the believing soul, in a cathartic manner and according to a molt close to the chrysalis, will no longer remain “lying softly in the womb of quiet idleness” or only provided with the “two pillows of ignorance and incuriosity.”40 She will give birth this time in a quasi-maieutic way to a new being, all the more transformed at the same time that it is shaken up. Her retrospective gaze measures her past, and her prospective aim consecrates her stupor as the place of her salvation: considering “on the one hand the long-time where she lived without these reflections,” and “on the other, being immortal, she cannot find her happiness among perishable things,” “she enters into a holy confu-sion and surprise that brings a very salutary disturbance.”41 A “holy anxiety” invades La conversion du pecheur, no longer the one that appears to be anxious (diversion) nor the one only concerned with one’s own ipseity (death), but the one that makes one’s faith depend-ing on another coming to find one’s (salvation).
5) Fifth observation: the converted sinner will not be content to see or understand, but will be strong enough to cry, or to be discovered crying. As is the case in the entire sacramental tradition of recon-ciliation, there is no confession without contrition in Pascal. What is true of confession must be said by the affect, which risks the oppo-site of proclaiming by mouth what the heart does not live. No longer confusing so-called “true happiness” (the mode of being in the world) with “lasting happiness” (the manner of happiness), his soul “weeps” over its “blindness,” but also over the obscurity of those who remained in past miseries.42
6) Sixth observation: this same soul had no place or lost her place, disowned by God as well as from herself, certainly above it, but less in an escape into the ineffable (Dionysius) than in the heart of God crossing all creatures (Bonaventure). The movement of justified
39. “La conversion du pécheur,” 290.40. Blaise Pascal, “Entretien avec M. de Saci,” in Œuvres complètes, 296.41. “La conversion du pécheur,” 290.42. Ibid.
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anxiety (from conversion) is less elevation than crossing, less discon-nection than integration: “knowing by a completely pure light that the sovereign good is not in things that are in her, nor outside her, nor in front of her, the soul begins to seek it above her. This elevation is so eminent and transcendent, that she does not stop in the heav-ens: there is no way to satisfy her, neither above the heavens, nor with the angels, nor with more perfect beings. She crosses all creatures, and cannot stop her heart until she reaches the throne of God, in which she begins to find her rest.”43
7) Seventh and last observation: knowing the end (the supreme good), the converted soul will wait “for God himself” to teach her “the way to reach it.” Here where the “forest travelers” in Descartes have no other solution than to walk firmly and resolutely “always as straight as they can in the same direction,”44 Pascal involves “another” or “others,” able to look for him in his distraction. Not leaving him alone in his isolated decision to go “always straight” even if it is from free will, at least provisionally, God himself or at least the Church and all believers, will be “adjacent” to him, in order to accompany him also in this “disorder of faith” or this “just anxiety” commonly shared: “the soul begins to know God and desires to arrive there; but as she is ignorant of the way to get there, if her desire is sincere and true, she does the same thing as a person desiring to arrive some-where, having lost the way, and recognizing her wandering, has recourse to those who knew perfectly well this way…”45
We can see it or at least feel it. The progressive access to belief or its way of preparation does not suppress anxiety, on the contrary, it redoubles it and reinforces it through and through. Better still, this possible interven-tion invites another and true anxiety – no longer a “restless” distraction, but that of the disciples’ “burning heart” on the road to Emmaus.46 The “con-version” or a return to the self in order to find God there, faces the “di-version” or a loss of the self in order to forget oneself in the world. From outside to inside, from inside to the transcendent, to resume the
43. “La conversion du pécheur,” 291. 44. Cf. René Descartes, Discours de la methode (3rd part), with appropriate com-
mentary from Denis Moreau, Dans le milieu d’une forêt: Essai sur Descartes et le sens de la vie (Paris: Bayard, 2012), 66-77: “On the second maxim” (the need of a point C [or a tree C] in order to not turn in a circle in the forest by fixing only on point A and point B; and thus the need to go step by step, rather than standing only ‘firm and resolute’ in a predetermined direction).” (translation JB).
45. “La conversion du pécheur,” 291.46. Lk 24:32.
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path of Bonaventure’s Itinerarium (extra nos, intra nos, supra nos), such is also the way that follows La conversion du pecheur as a propaedeutic to the experience of the Memorial, the culmination of an anxiety no longer only “of” faith, but also “in” faith: “Diversion – If man were happy, the less he were diverted the happier he would be, like the saints and God. Yes: but is a man not happy who can find delight in diversion? No: because it comes from somewhere else, from outside, so he is dependent, and always liable to be disturbed by a thousand and one accidents, which inevitably cause distress.”47
III. Anxiety in Faith or the Fear of Separation
The anxiety “of” faith or the “salutary disorder” of believing in the phase of conversion (La conversion du pecheur) now is relayed by anxiety “in” faith or the “fear of separation” from the Christian living and seeking direct experience of God (Memorial). In contrast to interpretations that make “certainty of belief” the conceptual centre of the Memorial, in a faith as firmly established as it is falsely assured of never being lost or threatened, I offer the “belief in certainty” by which it is not and never knowing one is a believer and holding to what makes belief, but only the act by which one adheres to it while at the same time being able to lose it. Nothing is certain of belief, except that the evidence comes from the “thing itself” (God), and never from the self (humanity).
“Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace,” traced in letters of fire from “the first paper version” of the Memorial at the very moment he under-went the experience and almost immediately recorded: in “the year of the Lord 1654, Monday November 23 […] From about half past ten in the evening until about half past midnight.”48 “Certitude, joy, certitude, feel-ing, sight, joy” rereads and modifies the “parchment scroll and copy” of the experience probably the day after its first writing.49 The redoubling and the inversion of a term between the two versions (“joy” as second occurrence inserted in the redoubling of “certitude”), the suppression of
47. L. 132/B. 170.48. Memorial, first version (paper). For the two versions of the Memorial, see
Emmanuel Martineau, Discours sur la religion et quelques autres sujets (Paris: Fayard/Armand Colin, 1992), 29-30; or online: http://www.penseesdepascal.fr/Hors/Hors1-moderne.php [accessed May 10, 2019]. The distinction between the two versions (“paper” and “parchment”) is helpfully explained by Henri Gouhier, Blaise Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 2nd ed., 1971), 13-22.
49. Memorial second version (parchment).
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another (“peace”), and the introduction of a new term (“sight”), marks well a novelty far from the absolute “fidelity” between the two versions of the text claimed by Father Guerrier in the second edition (“paper” and “parchment”) of the Memorial.50
There is, from the “paper” written in the hand of Pascal at the moment of his conversion (November 23, 1654) to the “parchment” writ-ten in the “same hand” the second day or in the days which followed (before being sown “together” in the lining of his “doublet”), the entire distance that one finds between the “saturation” of a phenomenon as soon as it is given and in the moment it gives itself, and its “limit” when it is measured by the yardstick of the subject for whom it was given. In other words, two non-contradictory, but complimentary interpretations of Pas-cal’s memorial are updated here: that which is based on his first version and first retains “certitude” and “peace” (written on the very day in the paper version), and that which is based on his second version wherein one can note the disappearance of “peace,” the redoubling of “joy” and the introduction of “sight” (the next day in his parchment version). In the first (paper) version, God gives himself in the overflow of his excess. It is enough to “believe in order to see” in the sense that the donation leads to vision here. It is to the entire credit of the saturated phenomenon that it relies on the evidence of the divine phenomenon in order to receive “cer-titude” and “tranquility” – the two central terms describing the experience of overflow at the same hour that it was given.51 In the second transcrip-tion (the parchment), one must somehow and conversely “see in order to believe.” The “sight” that replaces “peace” which became totally absent from this second version (despite the repetition and introduction of “joy” in the doublet of “certitude”), precisely indicates that “the evidence of
50. A note from Father Guerrier in 1732 for the edition of the Memorial: “a few days after the death of M. Pascal, a servant of the house accidently discovered in the lining of the doublet of this illustrious deceased that there was something that seemed thicker than the rest, and having unstitched this place to see what it was, he found there a small parchment, folded and written in the hand of M. Pascal, and in this parchment a paper written in the same hand: the one was faithful to the other” (Pascal, Œuvres complètes, 618 [the fidelity between the two versions is contestable due to the introduc-tion of joy, the suppression of peace, and the addition of sight]).
51. Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, Le croire pour le voir (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2010). See the interpretation of Pascal’s Memorial according to the meaning of the “eucharistic satura-tion” in Dieu sans l’être (Paris: PUF, 1991), 243-245, in particular, see note 17: “One could find a definition of the memorial such as it culminates with the Eucharistic present in the Pascalian approach to hope, hence to Christian temporality” [hope is defined here as fear before a present God (glory) rather than an anxiety with regards to a God that is experi-enced as possibly absent (sin)].” Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas Carlson, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 268.
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belief” given in the moment of the experience does not necessarily hold over the course of belief. We not only see because we “believe,” at least after the fact, but we also believe because we “saw.”52
The “limited phenomenon” does not oppose the “saturated phe-nomenon,” but shows another time and another mode of experience. There is the “extraordinary” way represented by Pascal in the moment of the Memorial (like every experience of conversion), then there is the way of “ordinary life” in the day following the first draft. Therein, one tries to “hold” on when God no longer seems to “evidently” give himself (which perhaps also describes the normal way of life for Christians). “Evidence,” “clarity,” and “distinction” display Cartesian values, even if they are reread and transformed by faith in the first draft of Pascal’s Memorial. “Doubt,” “obscurity” and “confusion,” inherent and con-natural to our humanity, following Merleau-Ponty here, also belong to every life of faith, at least here below – and Pascal probably draws this lesson the day following his conversion. “Peace” disappears and the thinker from Port Royal substitutes it with “sight,” as if it were necessary to agree to stumble along the way of existence as well as belief. That which has been received in the moment of “living” is never imparted in a permanent and assured way. An “anxiousness” always remains, includ-ing “in” or “interior” to faith. The “joy” of having “seen” keeps a secret trace, even if it is duly sown, not to say closed, inside the pocket of a “doublet” that says everything that was experienced there: “[…] the stage of the parchment corresponds with the will to insert the night of conversion into the time it turned into the beginning of life,” remarks Henri Gouh-ier with a great deal of accuracy, against all the currently accepted inter-pretations of the Memorial: “[…] It is an important fact that the joy experienced on the evening of November 23 felt like an impression of peace: but, upon reflection, Pascal recalls that peace is not a state of the Christian soul […] The drama lived by Pascal played itself out in the interior of faith.”53
52. The interpretation of the “limited phenomenon” as the “counterpart” to “saturated phenomenon” can be found in Falque, Passer le Rubicon, 183-187. For the “limited phenomenon” and its technical justification, see Emmanuel Falque, “Limite théologique et finitude phénoménologique chez Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologiques 92 (2008): 527-556. I also refer to the two interpretations, contrasted to say the least, of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Marion in my work: The Loving Struggle: Phenomenological and Theological Debates, trans. Bradley Onishi and Lucas McCracken (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 45-76, 97-140: “A Phe-nomenology of the Underground: Maurice Merleau-Ponty”; “Phenomenology of the Extraordinary: Jean-Luc Marion.”
53. Gouhier, Blaise Pascal, 21, 19, 43.
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Confirmation, if need be, of the modifications of the first paper ver-sion (the day of the memorial) by the second parchment version (the next day) are multiple then. Pascal does not remain solely with the initial emphasis on “certitude,” “joy,” and “peace” – this last one precisely being removed and replaced by “sight” in the aftermath of the experience. Like the relationship between the two Testaments, the two transcriptions of the Memorial illuminate one another, the narrative of the experience belonging to the experience itself. The terms, the drawings, the formatting, “every-thing” says this “night of conversion” is not only about “changing his life,” but also and especially about being open to the “beginning of a new life.” The following enumeration will demonstrate this here.
1) From the simple cross on the paper, we pass to the glorious cross on the parchment: the weight of experience (kabbôd) always appears after the fact so that the one who lives it measures the importance of it according to the delay or the shift in phase required by any birth. 2) The mention of “Scriptural references” and “Roman martyrology” transforms what was an individual and spontaneous living experience the evening of November 23 into liturgy. Rue Monsieur-le-Prince in the first paper is located in Port-Royal or in the abbey in the parchment text. Jacque-line’s feelings almost the day after his conversion (December 8, 1654) sufficiently testify: “I have nothing more to say to you,” she writes Gil-berte, “except that it seems clear that it is no longer his spirit which is in him, but the God of Jesus-Christ.”54 3) Yesterday’s fire (in lower case) becomes today’s FIRE (upper case). Due to the fear of seeing the embers go out, we always revive them in order not to lose them. 4) The “God of Jesus Christ” and the “grandeur of the human soul” both become underlined. The “God of Jesus Christ” certainly gives access to the one who comes to reveal himself, but it could also be that the “god of the philosophers and scholars” philosophically belongs to this “grandeur of the human soul” integrated into Revelation or the Gospel itself: “He is only recognized in the way taught by the Gospel. Grandeur of the human soul” (Memorial). The relationship between the three orders is not only “rupture,” as I have said, but also “figure.” 5) From “joy, joy, joy, tears of joy,” we pass to “joy, joy, joy, and tears of joy.” In the con-junction (“and”) there implies the entire distance between the experience and its re-reading, and the necessary gap wherein the interpretation itself becomes an experience. 6) “They have abandoned me (deliquerunt me), source of living water (fontem aquae vitae).”55 What reason is there to
54. Gouhier, Blaise Pascal, 32.55. Jer 2:13.
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suppress the “source of living water (fontem aquae vitae)” in the parch-ment version, if not to indicate that “affective charity” or the “loving fusion,” to say it with Bernard of Clairvaux, is not always and even rarely given, and therefore it is appropriate to pass through the “charity in action” or the “respect of the rule,” even if it is only to find one day the affect by which it is first given.56 The Memorial consecrates less the memory of a passed event as if the experience of God was the only thing it was necessary to bear witness to (which Pascal obviously refused, con-serving manuscript and parchment in his “doublet”), than it imposes and requires a fidelity to what happened even if it had been forgotten (hence the document folded and placed “as if it was on his heart”). 7) Total submission to Jesus Christ finally and “to my director.” Newly mention-ing the “director” here is not simply condescending to someone who should authenticate the experience, but passage from an individual expe-rience to an ecclesial confession in order to certify it even if no written record nor assurance was given to us.
There are multiple and significant modifications that we can see and we could probably multiply them. All these displacements only mean one thing. The challenge is not to believe but to “continue believing,” not to bond oneself but to “remain in the bond,” not the experience but the “manence.” Hence the decisive selection of biblical citations concerning the future, with one exception (“they have abandoned me”), making the memorial the act of opening to a future rather than the muse of memory. Hence the centre and probably the heart of this anxiety “in” faith deter-mines not only the Memorial, but the whole path, even the whole life of Pascal. Not only “I am separated from it” – certainly resumed as an echo from La conversion du pecheur and making visible the past in the moment of transformation – but “my God, why have you forsaken me? May I not be eternally separated.” Such is the true anxiety or restlessness of the future, “in faith.” Neither the misappropriation of the self or the false anxiety of diversion, nor the sole anxiety for those who are not anxious, nor the anxiety of the “self” for its own death, but the anxiety of losing the “other” who was given to me. From anxiety “for” the faith of those who seem abandoned (diversion), to the anxiety “of” faith at the dawn of being transformed (La conversion du pecheur), we now pass into the anxiety “in” faith, this time according to the possibility of sinning or falling (Memorial).
56. Cf. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs III: Sermons 47-66, Cistercian Fathers 31 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1979), 32: “but that seems espe-cially to apply to [love in] action” (see Sermon 50,3). With my commentary, “Expérience et empathie chez Bernard de Clairvaux,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologiques 89 (2005): 655-696.
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With anxiety “in” faith an additional step is taken in relation to the other. I do not confront myself only in the loneliness of distraction or death (anxiety of finitude), I accept not only binding myself in order to be trans-formed (anxiety of conversion), but it is now up to me to fear being “separated” from the other with whom I am attached (anxiety of sin): “will you leave me?,” I “will not forget your words” – non obliviscar sermones tuos. Amen (end of the Memorial).
From the anxiety of finitude we therefore pass to the anxiety of sin by which the latter is otherwise determined. While the first is only meta-physically concerned with myself in my face-to-face (vis-à-vis) with death (finitude), the second ethically raises the fear of losing the other no sooner than it was given to me (sin). An ethics takes over from metaphysics, as soon as the possibility of “loosening” or “disalliance” (desalliance) emerges as the possible horizon of any alliance. We do not “debase” in Christianity (marriage with a person of inferior status by avarice), but we sacramentally “unite,” while knowing however that one day we could “disunite” (se desallier) (others will say “separate”), even though God will never break his “alliance” and yet includes those who could “disunite.” The “oath” gives no guarantee to the one who enters into it, if it is not measured against the possibility of undoing it every day and therefore to the necessity of safeguarding it. The “fidelity of the flesh,” whether it is concerning the sacrament of marriage (spouse) or the sacrament of the order (priesthood), takes over from the “given word,” at the risk of never “refreshing” the contract by which the “this is my body” must be consumed. There is in Pascal’s Memorial, according to an analogy between religious experience and marital experience, a true anxiety of sin. Anxiety certainly over losing the one who has been given to me, but also over breaking the “face-to-face” in which I had definitely committed myself. The memorial of every alliance announces the pos-sibility of breaking it, and to be aware of it is to commit to fidelity.57
Therefore, the anxiety of sin finds its existential in Pascal: no longer the “differentiation” that makes love and consecrates the act of creating against the insufficiencies of punishment and the lures of fusion (see my Noces de l’agneau), but “separation” as the possibility of breaking with that which the flesh itself had duly bound and feared losing at the time of sealing even in the bodies the covenant (alliance) contracted (Mystère
57. On this “fidelity of the flesh” to the sole “integrity of the oath” I refer to Noces de l’agneau, 245-246 (Triduum philosophique, 564): “fidelity of the flesh” and “fidelity of the oath.” The neologism “desalliance” (disalliance) created in the present essay on Pascal can be, or could, serve as a paradigm for the anxiety of sin understood this time in the biblical framework (berith/alliance).
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de l’iniquite). “Love,” in the noble sense of eros converted into agape (body and eucharist), however, opens to the possibility of a “dislove,” as a fall upon oneself in non-resistance to the one against whom I always lean against (the fall and sin). We do not exist in order to not confront each other, and still less to flee from the other by which we are supported even if we are wounded. The “struggle of Jacob with the angel” is not only about my relationship to the authors in French phenomenology by which I experience myself and discover my own path (Combat amoureux), it also defines an existential – the position according to which the “strug-gle” (agôn) rather than the war (polemos) makes me alive – requiring me to rely on others in order to test myself (Mystère de l’iniquite). “I will not let you go until you have blessed me,” enjoins Jacob to the angel, already weary from having just struggled.58
Thomas Aquinas remembers, from the opening of his “Treatise on Faith” in the Summa Theologica: A quo separari est pessimum – “to be separated is what is the worst.”59 There is indeed the “servile fear” of the one who believes but lives only in the “fear of being punished by God (quis timet a Deo puniri)” (unformed faith). But there is especially the “filial fear” of the one who loves, an accomplished mode of belief this time, which makes one “afraid of being separated from God (quis timet separari a Deo)” (formed faith).60 From punishment to filiation – such is the way that the believer pursues and the way of his most powerful anxiety: not only the anxiety of losing everything by beginning to believe (La conversion du pecheur), but also that of becoming separated when one has already believed and loved (Memorial). The mode of “negative cer-titude,” an astonishing expression found under the pen of Gouhier con-cerning Pascal, signifies less the excess of that which is given (the previ-ously indicated way of Jean-Luc Marion), but the lack of that which is not given, or the non-recognized as a gift (the perspective at least sug-gested by Gouhier): “Pascal’s anxiety is in no way about doubt over the truths of faith,” we read with great accuracy in Blaise Pascal, “but, if one can say so, regarding a negative certitude, that of not experiencing the feeling by which faith is lived as a gift of God.”61
That there is an anxiety “in” faith at the very heart of the act of believing (Memorial), and no longer simply “of” faith in the very idea of “believing” (La conversion du pecheur), or with respect to those who turn
58. Gn 32:27. Cf. Falque, Le combat amoureux, 7-28.59. ST, IIa IIae, q. 7, a. 1, co.: “Whether fear is an effect of faith.”60. Ibid.61. Gouhier, Blaise Pascal, 30 (my emphasis).
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away from “believing” (diversion), such is the “turn of the nut” made by Pascal himself in his own rereading of the experience on Monday, November 23 in the year 1654, “since around half past ten in the even-ing until around half past midnight.” In the “paper version” (the same evening), the conversion is given and therefore it does not depend on the power of the human being to be able to grant it to himself. But post-conversion, or in the “aftermath of the evidence,” this includes also the human being in the “parchment version” (the following day). We will certainly pass from “evidence” to “certitude” in Pascal, but never according to some “divine guarantee” like in Descartes. The game is not intellectual, nor even emotional, but experiential. Already feeling like he “no longer feels,” the philosopher from Port Royal experienced a “joy” which remains (present in the two versions), but without the “peace” which accompanies it (in the first draft only). It is not that “peace” is not counted as one of the greatest attainments of the Christian faith, even becoming a criterion of discernment in Ignatius of Loyola for example, but it will never hide the anxiety of the believer whose faith is always given to him and never acquired.
Far from consecrating any “primacy of the believer” over “someone who does not believe” in an apologetic too sure of itself, the Memorial and the entire path of Pascal in general, therefore make us believe that we ourselves cannot believe, except in believing that God is always and only the One who gives us belief. Pascal is not only the man of conver-sion – a charge that is a bit too quick – but a thinker of the post-con-version, even of the hazard “of” faith, or better “in” faith. The lectio facilior would amount to thinking about what leads us to belief, accord-ing to a wager that would be misinterpreted in this case. The lectio dif-ficilior instructs us that it is more difficult to “continue to believe” only when we already believed, making “crisis” or anxiety the mode of being Christian, rather than the falsely assured certainty that is too abstract to not remain caught in the confession of never being able to grant it or make it last.
The anxiety here is not, or no longer just a passing state waiting for something better, at least as long as we are in via with Pascal. He deter-mines a restlessness that is constitutive of faith itself. What is true of the human being is also true of God, in that their “impossible Sabbath” remains somehow shared, understood in an eschatological mode. The “anxiety of man” in his possible separation with God is itself only a reflec-tion of the “anxiety of God” over the possible disunion of man. The anxiety of the created is not that of the creature alone, but also of the Creator in ransom for their common freedom. Non obliviscar sermones
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tuos – “I will not forget your words. Amen.”62 Thus ends the Memorial, as I have underlined, opening onto the future of loss as well as salvation and consecrating the existence of believing itself as the greatest danger to confront. Paul himself was the precursor in his address to the Philippians, which Pascal finally comes only to comment on: cum metu et tremore vestram salutem operamini – “work towards your salvation with fear and trembling.”63
Emmanuel Falque is Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Insti-tut catholique de Paris. His fields of interest are medieval philosophy, modern French phenomenology, and theology. His publications translated in English include: The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012); God, the Flesh, and the Other: From Irenaeus to Duns Scotus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015); Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); The Guide to Gethsemane: Anxiety, Suffering, Death (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); The Loving Struggle: Phenomenological and Theological Debates (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). Address: Institut catholique de Paris, 21 rue d’Assas, FR-75270 Paris Cedex 06, France. E-mail: [email protected].
