`The Sanctuary of a Naked Soul'

Blaise Pascal arrived in the mail twice on Thursday. Eric Ormsby’s latest book, Ghazali: The Revival of Islam, came, at last, from Amazon.com. Ormsby is a poet, of course, and a fine critic, but also a scholar of Islam. Abu Hāmed Mohammad ibn Mohammad al-Ghazzālī (1058-1111) was a Persian theologian and philosopher. In his preface, Ormsby writes:

“For the breadth, subtlety and influence of his work, Ghazali deserves to be counted among the great figures in intellectual history, worthy to be ranked with Augustine and Maimonides, Pascal and Kierkegaard.”

High praise, indeed, especially for a thinker about whom I know almost nothing. Pascal’s second appearance comes in a more unlikely form – the winter issue of Scope Quarterly, the magazine of my alma mater, Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The editors publish a regular feature, “Ad Lib,” in which they ask people associated with Skidmore to address an idea. This quarter’s subject is dread, and most of the responses are ridiculous. The head baseball coach dreads snow storms in the spring, telling a player he hasn’t made the team, and visiting the dentist. But Mary Crone Odekon, an associate professor of physics, gives a more thoughtful answer and cites Pascal’s best known sentence:

“There’s a fine line between dread and mystery, and cosmology and astronomy straddle that line. Vast empty space, infinities, black holes, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, even asteroids are dreadful, as well as beautiful, to think about. One of my favorite descriptions of this dread is from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, including his famous line `The silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.’”

Pascal (1623-1662) was a mathematician and scientist as well as a philosopher and theologian. One shouldn’t be surprised by a physicist knowing something of his work, though I am, nevertheless. I talk with engineers and scientists almost daily, and few have read much outside their academic speciality – an unfortunate lapse especially with a writer like Pascal, who is credited with devising such technologies as the first calculator, public bus service, syringe and wrist watch. In his practicality and inventiveness, he reminds us of Benjamin Franklin. Mostly, we value him as a thinker whose mathematical rigor is coupled with a profound spirituality. Unamuno writes:

“A reading of Pascal, and especially of the Pensées, is not an invitation to study a philosophy, but to know a man and enter the sanctuary of a naked soul.”

I have the copy of The Pensées I first read almost 40 years ago – the green-and-white Penguin edition, first published by J.M. Cohen in 1961. It’s beaten-up, over-annotated and turning brown but when I think of Pascal it’s this edition’s typeface and wording that come to mind. Mostly, I admire Pascal’s humility and sense of proportion:

“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”

How sad to know that Pascal died before his 40th birthday. His last words were “May God never abandon me.” In his sonnet “John Berryman 1,” Robert Lowell writes: “how gaily they gallop/to catch the ebb – Herbert, Thoreau, Pascal,/born to die with the enlarged hearts of athletes at forty…”