Blaise Pascal, blessed doubter
Pascal knew both the inconstancy of the human heart and the promise that we were made for glory.
Readers of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica have been following a series of freewheeling conversations between Pope Francis and Eugenio Scalfari, the paper’s founder and a celebrated atheist now in his nineties. At the end of a 2013 interview, Scalfari expressed the wish that the pontiff would someday share his thoughts on “that great soul,” 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal. In their most recent conversation, published on July 8, 2017, Pope Francis obliged. Pascal is a great soul indeed, said Francis, and deserves to be counted among the blessed. Accordingly he announced his plan to request a formal study of Pascal’s cause for beatification—which is remarkable on the part of this Jesuit pope, considering the ferocity of Pascal’s anti-Jesuit writings.
Should Pascal be beatified? Whatever else he may have been, he was certainly a genius. This is the prodigy who at age 11 was reputed to have discovered for himself the first 32 of Euclid’s propositions; who in his teenage years invented the first calculating machine to ease his father’s accounting chores; who in his twenties devised a series of experimental tests to confirm, against the scientific orthodoxy of his day, the existence of the vacuum; who, at the instigation of his gambling buddies and in correspondence with Fermat, laid the foundation for the modern theory of probability; who was an inspiration for the development of calculus, decision theory, and fluid mechanics; and who in the last year of his life invented the world’s first system of public transportation, designating profits to go to the poor.
Surely there is something divine in such an extraordinary scientific career. We could imagine, alongside the “holy fools” of Eastern Christian hagiography, a class of saints of the intellect who dedicate their gifts to the glory of God and the good of humanity rather than to the inflation of their own egos. Scientia inflat, as the saying from St. Paul goes, caritas vero aedificat—science puffs up, love builds up—but the scientist whose heart is transfixed by love is a wonderful thing. And Pascal’s heart was transfixed by love, as we know from the written record of his “night of fire” found after his death sewn into the lining of his coat.
