Pascal's Wager (23 page)

The archbishop, a consummate politician, realized that he had an opportunity now to gain a few points against the Jansenists, so he called in Père Beurrier and asked him if indeed Pascal had died the way his enemies had claimed. By this time, Pascal had been discovered as the author of the
Provincial Letters
, and so there were those who were looking for any way to defame his memory. Père Beurrier reported that Pascal’s enemies were in error, for he himself could attest to the fact that Pascal had received the sacraments before he died and had died in the good graces of the church.

The archbishop asked the priest to write down everything that he could remember about Pascal’s death, and asked him to give special attention to the fact that Pascal had received the sacraments and the fact that he had denied Jansenism before he died. After some arm-twisting, Père Beurrier did so, writing that “he had formerly belonged to the party of the gentlemen of Port-Royal, but that for two years he had been estranged from them, because he discerned that they went too far in matters related to the doctrine of grace.”
⁸⁰
The archbishop made sure that this account became public.

Pierre Nicole, however, responded to the priest’s account by saying that, far from estranging himself from the Jansenist movement, Pascal
had chided the other leaders of the movement for their willingness to sign the formulary, and had encouraged them to resist what he considered an unfair and unjust demand. Both Gilberte and Florin Perier agreed with Nicole’s account. After this, the controversy simply blew away with the shifting winds. Pope Alexander VII died, and his successor, Clement IX, negotiated a peace between the Jansenist movement and the rest of the Catholic Church. This became known as the Clementine Peace, but it didn’t last more than ten years. After that, the struggle started up once again and continued until the French Revolution erupted and set fire to the world.

S
ometimes, the primeval Greeks discovered a new valley, a new stand of forest that would speak to them. Often, there was a cave, or a spring pooling, with a stream bleeding off the overflow; often, it was on a high place, close to the gods, or by an oak tree struck by lightning, like scribbles on the earth saying “Zeus was here.” Something about the light, about the shape of the hills, about the way a stream bubbled through the trees made them feel the presence. They could not name this feeling, but there was always something uncanny about it, something numinous, and it frightened them and drew them in at the same time. “Surely a god must live in this place,” they said, and ordered games to tease out the god’s name so that they could build a temple there. There were racing games, and wrestling games, and archery contests, and discus throws. There were sacrifices of bulls and goats to the unnamed god. At the height of the festival, the priests, after purifying themselves, took sticks with letters or numbers carved into them, or took astragali, the knucklebones of sheep with numbers carved on the uneven faces, and would ask the god questions:

“What is your name?”

“What do you command?”

“How can we worship you?”

There was a throw, a reading, an interpretation, another throw, and by such fits and starts the gods revealed themselves. “It is Athena who lives here,” the priests said after multiple attempts in one such place, and the people built a temple to her, and initiated a cult to her name. Around that cult grew a city that survived through the ages.

Human life has the smell of oddness about it. We neither exist nor not exist; we stand somewhere in between. If we existed, and that alone, we would never die, and if we did not exist, and that alone, we would never be. But neither of these are our lot; we are suspended between such purities, and so we live out our lives like ghosts, caught between the worlds, trying hard to forget what we know by smell, what we know by the play of light on the eye—that life is evanescent, a dream, a flash of sudden
glory. Beyond that, no one knows, for no one ever returns. We can either ignore this truth, pretend it isn’t so and go on diverting ourselves, or we can face it, hard cold fact that it is. Some people who do face it brave death and jump out of airplanes; others go to war; others enter the monastery.

And some people gamble. Like the Greeks, who were insatiable gamblers, they risk great things on the throw of the dice. They ask questions of the shadows: Will I be rich? Will I find happiness? For the Greeks, the goddess who answered was called Tyche, the goddess of fortune, the goddess of luck, success, and chance. Like Demeter, who granted bountiful harvests, Tyche granted sudden fortunes, but then her partner, her other face, Nemesis, took them away. And then the people complained. “The lowest possible specimen of humanity, one who as the victim of Fortuna (Fortune) [Tyche] has lost status, inheritance and security, is a man so disreputable that nowhere in the world can he find an equal in wretchedness.”
⁸¹

Somehow, however, there is always a god in the world, hidden just out of sight, in the shadows, in that same play of light, in the feeling that something right nearby is sacred. Anyone who attends to the world will sense this, sooner or later. Even if that god has no name, the feeling is there, and is not limited to believers. Even those who do not believe in the god feel it, for belief has nothing to do with it; the feeling comes before the believing. It is primal, emerging from the ancient Olduvai strata of the mind, and it can be ignored or explained away, but it cannot be avoided. The only way to never feel it is to deaden your senses and sleep, and never really live.

But like the Greeks, we have games. We gamble because it is more than a game. It is a practice run on life, a ritual reenactment of the truth of human existence—that we are all gamblers, and that we face the mystery, that we throw the dice and ask the questions. You interrogate a gambler about his behavior, and he will inevitably say that it is fun. It is a sport, and cannot be analyzed beyond that. But that is not what really happens. In the act of gambling, the gambler invariably creates a narrative that has little to do with reality. Before each throw, gamblers, like the saints, are winners, and in the winning they are translated to some new emotional
place.
⁸²
It doesn’t matter if you point out that the house odds are against them, and that the story they tell themselves down deep, where no one can see it, is an opium dream, and that they run toward potential ruin like berserkers. Gambling, therefore, is a brave act, but brave in the way that a masochist is brave. It is also an act of stupendous hope. As in sex, a gambler’s pleasure is brief, lasting between the time the dice are thrown and the time the numbers are up. All the rest is devastation or afterglow. But we don’t live for the afterglow; we live for that moment, right then as the dice are tumbling and the world is at hazard. That instant, artificial as it is, is like a short burst of mysticism; the gambler stands fixed, not breathing, waiting on God for a word. Like sex, it is a single instant of eternity.

And that is why so many people get hooked.

Blaise Pascal ruined all of this by creating a new myth, the myth that one could have some control over the future through calculation. Cast adrift in the world, he was suddenly his own man, and with his friends, he attended salons and happy parties, standing on the sideline watching the gamblers try to keep their cool. It was a gentlemen’s game, a gentlemen’s version of combat, an act of honor, wrestling with Fortune and facing the wall of shadows. Did he understand then what was at stake? Possibly. Certainly, he was guilt-ridden about his life, for he had said so to Jacqueline on many long visits. He was lonely, and diversions helped him stem the long, sad hours.

He filled his days with conversation, with his researches into mathematics and physics, and eventually made new friends. Blaise and the pious and intractable duc de Roannez became close, and Blaise even sort of fell in love with the duke’s sister, though he might not have called it that, and though he treated her as if he were her father confessor. He was certainly attached to her, and wrote pious letters to her about salvation, which always turns a girl’s head. Through those friends he made associations with other, less savory friends, like the chevalier de Méré, the inveterate gambler and onetime saloon keeper, and others. The duke and his sister shared Pascal’s spirituality; the chevalier de Méré did not. However, all of them seemed to find the young man, sometimes arrogant, sometimes
quiet, sometimes brooding, an amiable companion, a true
honnête homme
, a Christian gentleman of integrity. But this was not the real Pascal, who found himself gradually sinking from one depression into another.

This was a deeply creative time for Pascal, however, as the ideas that later became the
Pensées
, especially the wager, precipitated out of the air of the salons. Pascal observed diversion in its elemental form, where knights hacked at each other with dice and betting chits and debts of honor. Supposedly, everyone expected the aristocrats to hide their devastation, for letting it out would have been the gambler’s equivalent of running before the enemy. But it happened, more often than not. Louis XIV’s mistress Athenaïs was notorious for throwing epic fits, ecstatic when she won and theatrical when she did not.

For Pascal the Jansenist, all of this was too much a part of the world, where the damned tarried for a short while before falling headlong into the flames. Still, his experiences as a kibitzer, and perhaps even as a gambler, were not devoid of religion, because Pascal perceived the action of God even in the throwing of dice. How else could he have come up with a gambler’s argument for faith, his famous wager? There were two vectors of experience in Pascal’s world, vectors that for inattentive people would have remained unconnected but that for a creative mind might well come together in new and interesting ways. First of all, in this time of his life, Pascal was a man of the world, living up to the expectations of his class and living the life of an intelligent gentleman. This meant parties; this meant diversion; this meant gambling. It is unlikely, given his health, that he engaged in any dangerous liaisons, nor would his conscience have allowed it. So instead, he invented the new mathematics of probability, the calculation of expectations, a mathematics for probing the mysterious heart of Fortune.

Theologians have long discussed a category of thought called Mystery—that is, the ultimate truth of the universe, which is beyond our rational powers. Pascal accepted this idea as a given. Modern physics has rediscovered that category, obliquely at least, by noting that there are dimensions of the physical universe that we cannot measure, and by noting that in
that limitation, we cannot know but only suppose. This is a limitation on reason,
ratio
in Latin; for reason and measurement are siblings, if not nearly the same thing. But oddly enough, while we talk a great deal about knowledge and reason, it is Mystery that moves us. Mystery seduces us. It is the essential oil of our best joys, from eroticism to mysticism, and of our worst terrors, from atomic war to hell. What you do not know, or cannot know, drives the heart as well as the mind, insinuating its odor into your entire self as you attempt to penetrate what by definition cannot be penetrated. Mystery is the heart of ancient religion—the feeling of dread in the presence of a dead body, the feeling of awe before the thunderstorm, the feeling of immensity under the night sky. It is the oceanic, the sublime, the greatest of fears and the greatest of wonders, and we are desperate in front of it. It is like walking into a pitch-black room and fumbling on the wall for the light, while from just over your right shoulder you hear the sound of heavy breathing.

Classical science has worked hard to dispel this category, waving it off as superstition, and assuring the public that with time science will explain it all. Of course, if scientists actually managed to do that, people would rise up and kill them. This is one reason why there has been such an emotional hubbub between science and religion. For, if religious people were to allow the scientists to explain it all in the squiggles of mathematics, it would take the joy as well as the terror from the world, and we so love both. If scientists, on the other hand, were to open their science to any concept that had the incense smell of religion about it, then, they fear, and perhaps rightly so, that they would be letting Mystery in by the back door, and the quest to explain it all would fail.

On the other hand, the explanations that scientists have handed down to the citizens have been chronically disappointing, especially after the nineteenth century, when scientific naturalism spilled over the causeway of method into metaphysics. As a species, we went out looking for the mind of God, and instead we discovered dust and gas. So once again, we human beings are more moved by what we do not know than by what we do know, which may be endemic to the species and a fairer assessment of
the human psyche than any other. Why else would we have left Olduvai Gorge?

Every day is a gamble, and just by climbing out of your bed and leaving your front door, you become a gamester. You calculate the odds, and you take the risks. This is what gives life its spice, for there is always a risk. Each morning over coffee, after the newspaper, you throw the dice. You start your day in uncertainty, because no one really knows what will happen from moment to moment. The future doesn’t really exist, except as a potential, as a daydream, as an intimation conjured from the present. The past is a memory that over time becomes a dream, and the present bubbles along, ephemeral as a thought, an everlasting mutation, making us feel as if the future were here, now, close enough to touch, but still elusive as smoke.

So we stand before the Mystery of this moment, terrified and awestruck as this moment dies and is reborn as the next. The mysteries of time and death are at the center of the human condition, and it has been so since we first achieved consciousness. This is the beginning place, Uncle Wiggly’s first hop, the place out of which all science, all religion, all literature, all philosophy, all art and music are born. Fortune and misfortune pour toward us from the middle of the thunderstorm, and we interpret their coming in the best way we can. For some people, the source of that coming is a divine figure, God, who lives in the heart of the Mystery and is Mystery itself. Any attempts to plumb the personality of that divinity by reason are called theology. For others, these things come of their own, pure chance, and cannot be tracked any further. And so we have grace and luck, two concepts that were at the heart of Pascal’s thought.

In a sense, grace and luck are not all that different. Both fall out of the surrounding mystery. The fact that God gives grace to some and not to others, as Augustine would hold, is almost a matter of luck. Why God chooses to love one and not another is weird beyond weird.
⁸³
The fact that the dice would come up sevens this one time when you need it so badly is a mystery of chance, and what is chance but a word that says, “I don’t know.” Who is Fortune that she gives her gifts to some and not to others?
But this strange idea—chance, luck—has become the foundation for an entirely new physics.

From the point of view of science, Pascal’s probability theory has set the stage for a new metaphysics, embodied in quantum mechanics, which places the most fundamental level of matter, the subatomic particles, into a shadow land between existence and nonexistence. They exist as probability clouds rather than as things, and they can never be tracked, never precisely measured. The world gets stranger by the day.

Quantum physics is the physics of the unbelievably small. Newton’s physics is good for describing the everyday, from baseballs to rockets to the moon. It can describe the orbits of planets and of spaceships, the bouncing of billiard balls and the arcs of cannon shells. But something unusual happens when things get small. The rules seem to mutate a bit even at the level of grains of sand. But down past the molecule, as electrons swirl like bees around the nuclei of atoms, the normal laws of everyday physics seem to break down and become something else. The old division between being and nonbeing breaks down with them, as subatomic particles pop into being and then pop out again. Electrons exist not in this place or that, but in those probability clouds that surround the nucleus and spin so fast you can almost hear them hum. The world at this level, then, is not an existing one but a probable one.