The Legend of Pascal's Life
Pascal is unique: he was both the most modern and the most Christian spirit of his time. His exceptionally sharp logic and clear insight met with passionate and profound religiosity. He was the clearest mind that his homeland ever gave to the world, and he was the finest soul anatomist of his century: beside him, Descartes seems like a mere arithmetician, a virtuoso, a mechanical mind.
Pascal was almost hysterically religious, a "theomaniac" seeker of God. His immense, consuming passion for religion fused with a first-rate research spirit: this was Pascal's striking psychosis, from which came the spirit's dramatic and tense play of colors. Nietzsche was right in his perception: anyone who wants to defeat the Christian worldview must first overcome Pascal, and he also sensed that Pascal could not be defeated.
In Pascal's life story, a dual portrayal already emerges: on one side, a brilliant career of a modern scientist; on the other, a gentle medieval saint's legend. At the age of twelve, with the help of some charcoal and paper, he independently discovered most of Euclid's theorems; at sixteen, he wrote a dissertation on conic sections, and his contemporaries believed that nothing like it had been written since Archimedes. At nineteen, he invented a calculating machine that could perform all arithmetic operations flawlessly, even without knowledge of the rules. At twenty-three, he astonished the world with his groundbreaking treatise on the vacuum, as well as his famous experiments on measuring air pressure, which still bear his name today.
Even at this stage, he began to recognize that science and all of its progress, in a higher sense, were meaningless to us; the true task of the mind was devotion to God. He became more closely involved with the Jansenists, a union of pious and scholarly men who followed the teachings of Bishop Jansenius of Ypres. They lived in monastic seclusion near Port Royal des Champs without forming a true religious order. From this grew the famous Port Royal school, which became the focal point of the entire scientific and religious life of the time.
In the second half of his life, which lasted for thirty-nine years, Pascal endured the greatest physical trials, but he bore them with the noblest patience, strength, and even almost serenity. Although he suffered from constant colic, headaches, gum inflammation, and insomnia, he renounced all comforts, took care of everything himself, and even took in a poor sick person whom he served and cared for. He gave thanks to God for his illnesses, for, as he used to say, illness is the only state worthy of a Christian, and he even feared the possibility of being healed. His sufferings truly brought him to heights that are closed off to ordinary mortals: they endowed him with a kind of weightlessness, and thanks to this, he was able to live a magical and mystical life under the bright sunlight of his rationalist century. In his final years, a celestial light beyond reality glimmered.