Pascal with Bacon on the side.

So, looking at these three books, I decided to start with Bacon as it was, superficially at least, the slightest of the three. And I have to say, it went very much over my head. I got the idea: it's an allegory, as any utopic vision must be, for a new order. But the weight of it, as I've been told exists, was lost on me. Originally, when I finished, I wrote a glib little summary of the book.

"The Great and Perfect Christian State, where white men worship God with perfect humility and, in following the teachings of Christ, behave with charity and love toward each other and strangers (as long as they are Christians), cherish chastity, marriage, and family that centers on reverence for the father, are whole with nature, pursue science in the name of God, and view knowledge as the ultimate good (tempered with the belief that God created all things). In this, men can live happily and well together. And women are there too. And Jews are allowed, as long as they love Christ, or even just like Christ. But they've got us beat in the after world, regardless."

I do accept that my thin take in it is no doubt due to my modern perspective. But like each of these books, I've got turn the corner and see that my modern perspective wasn't invented by me and me alone. And it was in this and the other two books that it indeed was created. I still don't think that Bacon was the heavyweight of the three, if only because it didn't argue it's point with much subtlety, or if it did, I missed it.

But I do get the discussion notes that he was theorizing a world of grace, and postulating that science is the way to negate the fall. It also seems, and this was borne out in the discussions, that he was proposing a form of democracy, which was inherent in the Utopian ideals that were floating around at the time of his writing.

These ideas, that there should be a merger of industry, science, and church/state, and that man should dominate and control nature to create it's ends, are the very foundation of the world we've been living in since that time. And that Bacon was part of the intellectual revolution that lay the ground for it.

I've come to understand, if only on a simple level, that this movement of philosophy was divided into three eras: the ancient philosophers, the christian philosophers, and the romantic philosophers. (Nussbaum)

We are leaving the ancient philosophers and now dealing with the Christians. Which introduces us to a new concept: the concept of Grace or Faith, that falls outside of Reason and Passion. And here is where I find Pascal so interesting. Rather than deny the difficulty of achieving a state of Grace (as compared to Bacon who, through his Utopia, is able to assume man's ability to rise above the Fall) Pascal seems to be very aware of how difficult it is.

He presents a view of reason and "imagination" as being both a gift and a curse to mankind. He states clearly that Man has been quite right to make these two powers (reason and imagination) into allies, because they bring us to beauty, justice, and happiness, which are the world's 'supreme good". But at the same time, he warns that the war between sense and reason are also "the most absurd cause of his errors". (II 44)

I think this is important, because it is in the contradictions inherent in man that we find a "proof" of God. Man's greatness is that he knows that he is wretched, and thus there must be hope that he can rise to Grace through faith in Christ.

And this is where I liked Pascal so much. The idea is that we must choose to believe in God because choosing to believe gives us the better chance of a good result. He is laying out, in a very elegant form of argument, that Reason, or proof, can only lead us to the door of Faith, and our knowledge of Good, Justice, and the happiness that come, but it is faith and faith alone that move us toward the "divinity" that Grace promises.

I found this to be a very humanist argument. Unlike the previous works, from Plato through Augustine, which reserve this "god-likeness" for a reserved few, Pascal's view seems, in it's attempt, at least, accessible to all. There are certainly those who are possessed of a "God given" Grace, the Jensenists to whom he belonged, no doubt, but it wasn't their exclusive territory. But we can ourselves strive toward Grace.

Re-reading the class notes, and after re-reading Pascal for our papers, I'm impressed with how difficult it is to get a grasp on everything that he was saying. The sheer difficulty of the text, with so many arguments not laid out but in note form, and the curse of our course which is a thin historical context for the works that we're reading, I'm not sure that I'm really scratching the surface of what Pascal was after.

Who were the Jensenists and what was his relationship to them? Did he really believe that he was 'chosen" for grace? He died so young, and accomplished so much, but can the life of seclusion and study he lived really lead him to any insight into human nature other than an Academic/christian point-of-view?

It's the historical context of his time that I find illuminating. Knowing that he, Descartes, Bacon and Gallileo were more or less contemporaries, knowing that the bridge between science and faith was being formed, at great peril, in some cases, shows me, in my brief glimpse, that Pascal was a man of great faith and humility, in spite of his sense of his own importance as a thinker and scientist. That he was so clearly aware of the nature of his intellectual abilities compared to his peers, makes his insistence on the limits of reason, even his ability to reason, in accepting God,so very unlike Descartes. Perhaps it was his early death and the health problems he faced that allowed him to see himself as human and limited.

Ultimately what he gives me is a great sense of hope that a life spent at least in the pursuit of grace, is a good life. Perfection is not an option.