By RAY CAVANAUGH
Pope Francis just published an apostolic letter, Sublimitas Et Miseria Hominis (“The Grandeur and Misery of Man”), to mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of Blaise Pascal on June 19, 1623.
The papal letter describes Pascal as “open to ever new and greater horizons” and “marked by a fundamental attitude of awe and openness to all reality.”
This letter is not the first time Francis has acknowledged the French polymath who made important contributions to mathematics, physics, and philosophy. In a 2017 interview, Francis went so far as to say that Pascal “deserves beatification.”
Born in central France, Pascal had two sisters. His mother died when he was just age three, and his father was a prominent lawyer with a strong mathematical bent.
When Pascal was age eight, the family moved to Paris, where the father home-schooled his children. When he was age twelve, his father examined his notebooks and discovered that his son had already mastered Euclidean geometry.
By age 16, Pascal was authoring influential treatises on geometry, such as Mystic Hexagram. The work was so well done that people were initially convinced that the father had authored it instead of the teenage son.
Just before turning 20, Pascal invented an early calculating device in an effort to help his father with tax calculations.
At this point, Pascal was already acquiring a favorable reputation in the French scientific milieu. But he was also contending with ill health that left him incapable of performing daily work, be it scientific or otherwise.
Despite such complications, he proceeded to develop what many consider the world’s first public transport system. His work on hydraulics culminated in “Pascal’s law.” He was also a pioneer in the field of probability theory, which has major implications for both gambling and economics. And he even merged probability theory with theology by way of Pascal’s Wager — a famous logical argument for belief that has received extensive coverage from such books as Jeff Jordan’s Pascal’s Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God.
As a writer, Pascal is viewed as having a genuine literary style and a large influence on ensuing generations of French authors, including Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Amid all his achievements, the most important event in Pascal’s life took place on November 23, 1654, when he underwent what he described as a “night of fire.” Pascal, then age 31, recorded his experience on a piece of paper which he titled “Memorial” and then inserted into the lining of his coat. It was discovered after his death.
Pascal was a believer even before this night. He just never felt it so strongly. Now feeling an intense connection to God, he would remark, “The immortality of the soul is so important to us, something that touches us so deeply, that we need to have lost all feeling to be unconcerned with knowing what is at stake.”
This was someone who, after his “night of fire,” carried a torch forever. He would write that, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”
After the “night of fire,” Pascal began making frequent retreats to an abbey outside Paris, and his thinking and writing increasingly turned toward religious matters. He embarked on writing Apologie De La Religion Chretienne (a book of Christian apologetics), but it was never completed. Also, while in the grip of his chronic physical ailments, he wrote, “Prayer to Ask of God the Proper Use of Sickness.”
Pascal did not always take medical advice and seemed rather resigned to ongoing ill health, once saying that, “Sickness is the natural state of Christians.”
The decision of Pascal’s sister Jacqueline to join a nearby convent upset him because she had been his most trusted caretaker. Her death in 1661 would upset him far more yet.
In the summer of 1662, his health began to deteriorate further. Amid his decline, Pascal, who had once stated that “the sole object of Scripture is charity,” reportedly said, “If the physicians tell the truth, and God grants that I recover from this sickness, I am resolved to have no other work or occupation for the rest of my life except to serve the poor.”
He never had a chance to live up to this quote, dying at age 39 on August 19, 1662, after receiving extreme unction and uttering the words, “May God never abandon me.”
The origins of Pascal’s ill health were never definitely determined, but an autopsy performed soon after his death revealed severe irregularities in his abdomen. He very possibly had both stomach cancer and tuberculosis.
Looking past the misfortune of his chronic sickness and early demise, there is much to celebrate in the story of Pascal. His life was a triumphant quest for ultimate truths which he sought in the lines of geometry, the formulas of physics, and, finally, the presence of God.
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