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The Night of Fire
Blaise Pascal, mathematician, scientist, inventor, and philosopher, a man who from the age of 16 had been making historic contributions to mathematics and the physical sciences, who, despite a sickly constitution and a capacity for intense abstraction nonetheless oversaw the material construction of his experiments and inventions with great zest, was barely past 30 when saw something unexpected one raw November night. He saw fire. The vision of it so branded him that he sewed the record he made of it, his Memorial, into his coat, carrying it with him the rest of his life:
In school, I was taught that Pascal meant it when he said, “GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob / not of the philosophers and of the learned” – that after his night of fire that fateful November, Pascal really did renounce all scientific thought as libido excellendi, the concupiscence of the mind. Bertrand Russell called this renunciation “philosophical suicide.” Nietzsche called Pascal “the most instructive victim of Christianity.” By contrast, Pascal’s sister and hagiographer, Gilberte, who first related the renunciation, regarded it as a triumph of faith over the illusions of this world. Years earlier Jansenists had stayed with the Pascal household, and young Blaise had convinced his sisters to adopt Jansenist teachings – teachings so passionately attached to Augustine’s vision of man’s total depravity as to be almost Calvinist despite their nominal Catholicism — so attached as to believe even reason itself was corrupt, a chimera, a mirage misleading the minds of men. The mirror we see in so dimly is far too dim to show reason undistorted, or at least not the reason that matters.
Hence “not of the philosophers and of the learned.” Quite a grim prospect for any of us trained to believe that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is also the God of the cosmos and of all who study it. And what would it mean if the “not” were true? What would it be like to abandon the whole edifice of scientific understanding, to kick off the twin traces of evidence and proof, and plunge, headlong and burning into… something else altogether. I am not sure what. Only that for a very long time, it has been hard for me not to wonder.
And so, the story goes, the man who, only months before, had been collaborating with fellow mathematician Fermat in founding an entire new discipline, probability theory, abandoned it all to become first a sarcastic theological crank (see the Provincial Letters), and finally the tortured soul dying tragically young, leaving his magnum opus, an existential defense of Christianity, so unfinished that only scattered fragments and notes could be gathered and published – the Pensées.
Or at least that’s the story as it’s commonly told. The real story is not quite so pat. Accounts differ as to how deep Pascal’s renunciation of scientific thinking went. Like Nietzsche and Russell, the folks at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy seem to believe it went pretty deep. Other sources, though, point out he never did fully abandon his interest in math and science, and still pursued the odd project here and there. Moreover, scientific habits of mind do not disappear overnight, even if you’re not doing science. Certainly, the famous Wager of Pascal’s Pensées shows a mathematical mind still at work. It isn’t often that a theological conceit with all the deference of a mugging is credited with mathematical innovation, but Pascal’s Wager is counted as one of the first uses, ever, of decision theory. (As well as a kind of argument irresistible during election seasons: “Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then?” – of course Pascal, already believing his beliefs, thought everyone must see themselves as already embarked, as already consigned to his binary choice, no matter how much unbelievers might see it otherwise.)
Still, it’s worth asking why the renunciation went as deep as it did, when it did. After all, Pascal had been a Jansenist for years while remaining active in scientific circles. His mind had been converted long before. The night of fire, though, was a conversion of the heart.
For Pascal, the heart was supremely important, though not in the romantic or emotional sense, or even, necessarily, in the same sense other pious Christians speak of it. Perhaps the heart meant the faculty of perception “transcending reason and prior to it”[2], what Schumpeter (and Sowell after him) called Vision. Within mathematics, Pascal spoke of an esprit de finesse that leaps ahead of reason and draws it onward. Polya would later quite charmingly call this intuitive spirit just “guessing,” though Polya would make guessing into an art. Polanyi would point out that this intuition, though not emotion itself, demands emotional commitment. Pascal opposed l’esprit de finesse to l’esprit géométrique, the “geometric spirit” of articulated, deductive reasoning – the faculty of the mind that, however persuasive it might be, is often just on janitorial duty, tidying up the syllogisms after l’esprit de finesse has passed. The “heart” (coeur), as Pascal spoke of it, seems to encompass the intuition preceding reason just as it encompasses the “revelation” that reason is in vain. If this seems contradictory, perhaps Pascal would point to Jeremiah 17:9: “the heart is deceitful above all else.” Even so, “some faint glimmer or trace of the instantaneous, clairvoyant understanding that the unfallen Adam was believed to enjoy in Paradise”[2] must remain, else faith and reason would both be blind.
And the eyes of Pascal’s heart saw fire.
Fire – fire consuming the flowering thorns on sun-bleached prairies; fire arcing from the tips of the branches of roadside trees, from towers and steeples, weaving a net as visible to the mind’s eye as it is invisible to the body’s eye: these visions are not hard to have, and not particularly special, either, if no moral sense gives them meaning. There’s speculation that Pascal, like Hildegard of Bingen before him, suffered migraines, headaches causing hallucinatory auras. If so, both visionaries made something out of those auras, they made them into something revelatory, unlike other sufferers who may just regard the auras as a nuisance, an impediment to everyday adult responsibilities, and all the more painful for being so.
But then, Pascal, for all his accomplishments, never did lead what most of us would call a life of adult responsibility. He never held a job. If his sister’s account is to be believed, not only was he so sick in infancy that he screamed continually for over a year, but he “continued to be so ill that, at the age of twenty-four, he could tolerate no food other than in liquid form, which his sisters or his nurse warmed and fed to him drop by drop.”[1] Pascal relied on nursing care not only throughout his sickly childhood, but throughout adulthood as well, exhibiting “an almost infantile dependence on his family.”[1] By contrast, I suspect the attitude in most modern American households would be, “If you’re well enough to scale the heights of intellectual and spiritual achievement, well enough to mortify your own flesh in penance (something Pascal did in his later years), then you’re also well enough to feed yourself like a normal adult, thank you very much!”
In some circles, habitual suffering does seem to excuse a body from everyday obligations. In others, it seems to impose extra duties. (Thou Shalt Suffer Extra-Discreetly. Thou Shalt Endeavor Doubly To Not Impose.) Not that these circles are mutually exclusive – there’s no rule saying the same social circle must treat all who suffer equally, despite differences in social standing, other gifts, and the suffering’s nature. We ordinary mortals sometimes surmise that suffering spurs not stifles genius, as if suffering itself could cause genius. We may overlook, though, how much the great suffering geniuses rely on their caretakers to manage life’s little inanities for them. Stephen Hawking certainly had to depend on others to turn his paralysis into opportunity. Pascal was, by comparison, far more able-bodied. Though Pascal suffered greatly, he was also cared for greatly, so greatly it’s not hard to suspect he could have gotten by on less.
Had Pascal been expected to shift for himself more, would he have burned as brilliantly? Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not.
The world of math can be an escape from suffering, a winter Eden – the bones of the trees of life and wisdom freed from the flesh of their leaves, the pages of innocent snow awaiting inscription, all stilled, all crystallized – a nature “out of nature,” set apart from the bloody, sticky summer which commends “whatever is begotten, born, and dies.” The mental stillness demanded by l’esprit géométrique beckons as a refuge from the ravages of mind and body, but entrance to this refuge costs a fee. Some of my own most peaceful memories are of solving math problems to escape life’s vicissitudes – while feverish, in a hospital, in the rubble of a shattered future. But even then, no matter how restorative, the problems demanded something of me first: If I couldn’t muster that something, the hope of refuge was lost.
It’s not hard to imagine that a man like Pascal, dogged since infancy by suffering, first fell in love with math because he could make it a refuge, a pursuit absorbing enough that his suffering ceased to matter. Is it possible that he fell away from math and into theology and mysticism when, despite all the care he received, he reached a point where he could no longer get his suffering to cease to matter?
Neither mathematical nor scientific reasoning is intended to answer suffering. The freedom they offer from suffering is just the freedom of a perspective where suffering doesn’t matter either way. That perspective can be a great comfort as long as there’s enough oomph to maintain it. When the oomph is gone, though… Inhabiting a winter Eden means fueling your own fire, else you freeze. When your own fuel runs out, where do you turn? Perhaps to some greater fire outside yourself. Perhaps to the fire so great it appears to be a God. And perhaps that great fire is an illusion. Or perhaps it isn’t. The only witness to the fire is the heart, as clairvoyant as it is deceitful.
No wonder Pascal wagered.
For @nanda-panjandrum.
This is a fascinating post and discussion. Now off to read more about the Jansenists and Pascal…
Ah. For me, the vision of a firebird or fiery phoenix may be similarly beautiful, rather than hellish or scary. If you asked me to draw a picture of the Holy Spirit, I would draw a “dove”, but it would look more like an eagle bursting into flames.
I once met an icon-painter who was giving a lecture on her craft. I had noticed one of her icons had a hummingbird adorning its apex. I could suspect why it was there (it was in a place where a dove might go in other icons), but had to ask:
For her, the way hummingbirds hovered and glittered, so beautiful despite their inconspicuous size, was how she pictured the Holy Spirit.
Oh…
Now I see what you mean by the Jansenists being fun. Yowza!
By that, do you mean the Roman Catholic Church? Wouldn’t know.
This is more like it! Thanks Midge for the great post and discussion fodder!
Would you mind selecting the Group Writing category under Edit Options?
I see…I see you eating pistachios…
Oh, and I suppose I choke on one?
No, you accidentally bite down on a piece of shell, and it tastes really bad for a second…
I’ve had experiences like that. I keep meaning to write things like that down so I can confirm it’s not a trick of the memory. I suppose that I haven’t is evidence supporting the case that it is a trick of the memory.
You mean tag it with “group writing”?
In a way, Pascal is the philosopher of ennui, that which we are fighting vainly. His father had philosophical plans for his education, or what seemed to him such. The tale told of the boy-Pascal is, he discovered Euclidian geometry by his lonesome–a transgression of his father’s rule, to study the loftier classics. One wonders whether the father or the son is the stranger being, but it seems like the son has a better claim to what Shelley said of Keats: He, as I guess, had gazed on nature’s naked loveliness. The classics spend a lot of time gussying up nature to look lovely. One part that might not require much of that is geometry. It has a very good claim to teaching us learn in what world we live.
Now, as it happens, the boy Pascal is said to have presented to a learned circle a treatise of geometry, concerning conics–take a cone, cut it at various angles, look at the shapes created on the surface of the cone by the cutting plane. It was the circle of Pere Marin Mersenne, the precursor to the Academie des Sciences, who counted among his correspondents not merely Pascal the father, but Descartes, & other important scientists, mathematicians, & philosophers. The tale tells that Descartes disbelieved the boy’s authorship of the work.
Now, this man, who has done no memorable work himself, played host in a certain way to men of great importance, Descartes above all.
Descartes is the man who transformed geometry into Cartesian space. This was an important step in destroying the natural basis of mathematics. This was a necessary work for the arrival of modern mathematics, perhaps in all its forms.
Oh, bother! This is getting too long & these comments are nuisances! Midge, let this answer be a new post!
Of course it can be! I have no idea what’s meant by destroying the natural basis of mathematics, since even modern mathematics strikes me as quite natural, but I’m curious as to what you have to say about it!
A matter of full abstraction out of natural imaginings into the realm of pure mind and thought, I believe is what he means.
He might have meant the category, in place of Religion & Philosophy.
More abstract than, say, the Pythagoreans? More abstract than “the music of the spheres”?
Perhaps I don’t see modern mathematics as having retreated, since measure theory, group theory, the weirdness of advanced formal logic, etc, all have a place in describing existence “out there” as well as “in here”.
Best guess, unless he comes back to explain.
I’ll explain very briefly what’s on my mind–the problem is very serious, but I am no longer a student, so I can hardly afford even the week it would take to go back to read up & notes on Husserl & Klein & try to point out some of the more commonsensical points about the transformations created by Descartes (& I believe Galileo is involved in this, though I–not an expert in the field–tend to rate him as less important). So anything but a brief explanation might lead into a chaos.
Now, our world, bequeathed to us by Einstein & the more or less innocent mathematicians who did geometry in before him, involves a kind of mathematical thinking where you read up on the axioms in Euclid’s Elements & say, ‘Well, about this business with, through a point exterior to a line there can only be drawn one parallel to that line…, how about we change that!’ (Perhaps something similar may be said with regard to what are called imaginary numbers–I don’t know why…) Now, geometry as Euclid thought of it & the n-dimensional constructs one learns in our days are quite different; the meaning of axiom in the ancient & the modern case has changed. In the ancient case, it really was tied up with what Greeks thought they had discovered & called nature–the sense that you could take any axiom, reverse it, & build something else is wholly alien to that enterprise.
Descartes’ algebra originated the change. 250
Ok, so after a day of thinking about & writing on the matter at considerable length, I’m more than three thousand words in & it would be four thousand in all before I’m done. I have become persuaded of the futility of the endeavor. I shudder at the thought of subjecting innocent people with actual lives to live to interminable discourses.
If you happen not to have fallen in love with my writing over the last year–you dodged not a bullet, but a salvo!
The short of it is, Tocqueville understood American character as it is shaped by democracy through Christian-philosopher perspective of Pascal–Pascal, whom he not only quotes but used to write about as a friend & teacher! It was the necessary corrective to the astounding power of the spirit of Descartes. Descartes, whom he never discusses & we have no evidence he ever loved he declares the spirit-animal of America, where he is unread, because every American is now his own philosopher in the sense of Descartes.
Tocqueville of course was an atheist but one persuaded that Christianity is irreplaceable & will be the rock for many Americans–the more so the worse progress hurts people’s confidence in their own humanity.
As long as it made sense, I’d probably enjoy it very much.
That’s very kind of you to say, Mr. Findy.
Maybe that’s why HP Lovecraft treated “alien geometries” as a frightening thing? ;-P
But we live in a world where parallel lines do appear to meet, and once artists learned the geometry of perspective drawing, it’s not so hard to see what might happen… It is because of an intuition shaped by youthful art lessons in perspective that I thought to Wikiped the topic, and yep,
Perhaps all of this can be blamed on the realization that it is not darkness but light which is substantial – light is a physical thing – and we don’t see what is “out there” directly, but rather the light that touches us. Maybe once sight and sound are known to just be two very specialized senses of touch (one photonic, one atmospheric), it’s all downhill from there!
Oh, now this is interesting! Do tell!
In your own time, of course – and probably in an OP. That is, if you can get around to it!
Midge, this is terribly unserious. How can parallel lines appear to meet unless you have a prior understanding of parallel lines? If you do have that, it only requires reflection to get to what Euclid had on his mind. If you do get even a vulgar understanding of what Euclid meant by geometry, which schoolboys still might, for all I know, then you have come upon the ground the Greeks claimed to discover, nature. That is their way of making sense of the phenomena or saving the phenomena (Greek for appearances or apparitions). So that would involve looking to understand why lines verified to be parallel nevertheless seem to intersect at a distance. Implied in the very way you put the problem are all the distinctions of geometry as arising from common sense.
If you wanted to show a kind of similar process for the kind of geometry Einstein used in his work, that would be a kind of comparable example. As you see, this is not about some kind of specialized knowledge or a rare insight. It is as concrete as common sense attended to carefully–something that should come across even in my however unfortunate explanations above.
If you could come up with an intuition that is even remotely workable similarly, then…250
I’d say about Lovecraft, he’s a guy who’s trying to destroy what he thinks of as the false promise of Progress by reversing the modern hopes, the future is a perpetual increase of power, order wins over chaos, &c.
I agree; this sounds like it’d be a fascinating and useful post.
Thanks, kindly, both-
Huh! (strokes chin)
The question is, does our natural perspective matter, or is it mostly a worthless setting that science has to transform? In reality, people have to switch between a scientific & a sorta-kinda-natural view constantly.
Pressed on this matter, what can people say? They will say: Well, it has to be done, ’cause we need science for prosperity, &, too, it’s true! (They don’t often wanna say what follows, that the human perspective is false. That would be imprudent & instead they’d prefer to say, science is human, too, not just the human perspective. But of course, when you have to say, this is human, too, you’re sorta admitting, it’s really alien!)
Read Midge above: People have to learn to think of sight & sound as new forms of touch. Photonic touch. That’s Star Trek stuff: Star Trek is a post-American American future where everyone who disagrees with science–Kirk, who constantly has to be lassoed by scientists–has to escape earth & run into deadly danger to defend his human freedom, not to say his manly sense of his own importance. Back to our world, nobody but a few scientists wants to learn about photonic touch or atmospheric touch.
It’s no more human than the crazy Sagan saying, we’re all made of stars! These are aliens trying to say they understand humanity.
But common sense attended to carefully also tells me this:
If I walk along train tracks and look straight down at my feet, the lines always appear parallel, but if I look ahead or behind, they appear to meet. This does suggest some curvature in how I am forced to see things. Same with the horizon over the ocean – if it really were a straight line “out there”, it would appear to tilt according to the rules of perspective as I turned my head from side to side. (And indeed, ultrawide lenses “see” such curvature.)
What I am talking about doesn’t strike me as specialized knowledge or rare insights either – they are common enough to the attentive. It may well be unserious – antic – and it is certainly dependent on being able to imagine two lines whose distance apart is constant wherever you walk up to measure them, but it’s not really that weird to speculate, “If my eyes always see parallel lines meeting in a vanishing point, maybe they are ‘meeting’ in a sense.”
Well… one thing math and physics (or art, or music, or dance, or sports) education does is educate your intuition, no? Shouldn’t any learning offer opportunity to educate the intuition? Maybe intuition can be educated to the point of freakishness, rather like coloratura work is freakish compared to the untrained, “natural” soprano voice. But the training is an odd hypertrophy of innate human ability, not the introduction of something alien or inhuman.
This seems the crucial passage. I’ll answer briefly: You take words like intuition & do to them what modern geometry does to the word axiom. The fact that people find it plausible only means you cannot imagine that it didn’t use to–which is easily verifiable. Now, if you cannot do that, you cannot make the comparison between now & way back when. But that is the crux of my argument. Your attempt to explain away the difference is what I meant by an unpleasing unseriousness.
I read somewhere that Pascal was touted as the last human being that knew everything there was to know in his day and time. The Night of Fire sounds like the greatest piece of knowledge he discovered.
Great post Midge.