Pascal's Wager (6 page)

P
ascal was fourteen years old when he entered Père Mersenne’s seminar, and sixteen years old when he presented his first paper, his one-page essay on conic sections. He was no doubt the enfant terrible, the prodigy, the boy from whom everyone expected great things. At this point in his life, young Blaise was little more than an extension of his father, Étienne. Always under his father’s thumb, he showed little evidence of adolescent rebellion, for nearly everything he did was to gain his father’s approval. For some in the group, especially Descartes, he may have seemed too proud, too confident for a boy his age, but then again, how would any sixteen-year-old react to praise lathered on not only by his father but by his father’s friends?

One can only imagine the conversations held in that room: the reports from Père Mersenne about the latest scientific discoveries; the terrifying news of Galileo’s trial, which everyone in the group—Catholics all—deplored; Étienne’s discussions about the longitude question; Père Mersenne’s latest attempts to predict prime numbers; and the most recent controversy of several on Descartes’ algebraic geometry and on his
philosophy. In the back of everyone’s mind, however—troubling them all, including Descartes—was the secretive group of doubters and freethinkers who had burrowed their way into the intellectual life of Paris. These were the
libertins érudits
, that collection of atheists and materialists, like Cyrano de Bergerac, whose ideas were being quietly discussed in the salons and universities around the city. Père Mersenne wanted to refute them. Descartes wanted to employ their very doubt against them, to make it impossible to doubt by finding one undoubtable truth.

The roots of unbelief go deep in Western culture, predating Christianity, back to Rome, back to Greece, perhaps as far back as religion itself. Atheism and materialism form a tradition of their own, a belief system of their own, a vision of life with its own body of arguments, a tradition that is forever the negative of religion, its dialogic partner in the great conversation. Who knows why some people are religious and others are not?

For Pascal, in his later work, those without faith were predestined by God to be faithless. He believed that God chose to be revealed to some people and to be hidden from others. This was his theory of the
Deus absconditus
, the hiding God. The issue is still alive. For contemporary biochemists, there is talk of a God gene—a gene that, expressed in one way, leads to spirituality and an abiding sense of the presence of God and that, expressed in another way, leads to materialism and the sense that human beings are but bags of chemicals. Perhaps these two points of view are not that different, in that they both assume a manner of fate. However, some hear the music of the angels, and some do not. The Gospels often point to the same experience: “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear!”
¹³
Why this is so is the strangest of things, for luck and grace seem like the twin sides of the god Janus.

Everyone believes, for there is no other way to live. There is no way out of this. Pascal saw this in his famous passage on the wager. Even those who say they
know
, that they have no need of belief, are throwing the dice. They are just throwing them harder than most.

The doubters in Pascal’s time were largely Deists, those who rejected the idea of Providence, the belief that God is directly involved in the lives of people. This new religion was a rejection of the heart of Christianity
and not a mere tinkering with the theological details, as had occurred in the rift between Protestants and Catholics. Moreover, it was a perfect religion for the growing scientific mentality of middle-class capitalism, with its God who, once having created, stood back and observed the working of the world without getting his fingers dirty, without trying to alleviate pain, or save souls, or punish the wicked. That left room enough for human enterprise to do the rest.

Deist manifestos, often written as poems and often anonymously, circulated around Paris. The most famous of these was the
Quatrains du déiste
, which rejected all anthropomorphic images of God as superstition. How can the Eternal God be like mere human animals? To be Eternal, God must be something else, something Other, something abstract, like Plato’s Ideas:

For the Deists, God was beyond humanity, and that meant that such human notions as God’s wrath, God’s love, and God’s law were all foolish superstition. Père Mersenne was furious with this last part. In his
Impiety of the Deists
, he attacked the
Quatrains
as the summation of every doubting impiety since the beginning of Western culture: “I think that your poet has assembled all the impieties of Lucian, of Machiavelli and of all the libertines and atheists who ever existed…to argue that Divine Law is but an imposture.”
¹⁵
Mersenne took the whole business to be a plot to ensnare the foolish and naive in this world, to draw them away from the faith. Later Pascal, in one of his most Jansenist moments, took up
Mersenne’s banner and carried it further, claiming that the Deists were little more than atheists.

But what Mersenne and Pascal did not realize was that Deism had been given room to grow in Europe because of their own work. A few years after his sojourn with Mersenne’s seminar, Pascal proved the existence of the vacuum—that there could be empty space in the world, space not filled with anything. And behind this concept was the new Copernican universe that took humanity out of the center of things and sent the Earth spinning around a mediocre star in a nondescript corner of a medium-sized galaxy. How could the creator of all
that
be born to a single species of animal living on a lukewarm nothing planet like Earth?

This was the new universe that they were living in, the universe that was only beginning to reveal itself, the universe that gave Pascal such terrors in his last days. And the Deists had a better grip on it than the Christians. It was not until the twentieth century, when this universe proved even stranger than the Deists could imagine, that the increasingly strange vision of a God who becomes human could make sense once again, and even then only through the back door. With a universe as odd as this, anything can happen.

D
isaster! In March 1638, Étienne Pascal fled Paris, running for his life. Two of his friends had been put into the Bastille, while those who had evaded the cardinal’s agents were looking for some hole to crawl into. Étienne ended up back in Clermont, in his hometown, where the network of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews could hide him better than he could hide himself in Paris.

As with most things, this drama began with the cardinal. When Étienne had brought his children to Paris, he had several financial assets: his house in Clermont, on the rue des Gras, and his office in the Cour des Aides—an office, like many others in France at the time, that could be bought and sold. When Étienne sold his office, he took most of his money and invested it in French government bonds, or
rentes
. These paid the interest of 1 livre per year for every 18 livres invested at the time of his investment. This made Étienne’s investment worth 65,665 livres. However, within a few short years Cardinal Richelieu brought France into the Thirty Years’ War on the side of the Protestants because he feared the
spread of Hapsburg power. We must remember that the Hapsburg family ruled Austria, parts of Germany, what is now the Czech Republic, a good chunk of Italy, and the entire Spanish empire. The Hapsburgs were also ultra-Catholic and were using their power to fight the increasing influence of Protestantism. Richelieu, a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, worried more about infringements on French sovereignty than about the life and health of his church, and so he declared war on the Holy Roman Emperor. The problem with war, however, is that it costs a lot of money, and the cardinal had to get that money from somewhere. The cost of the war had nearly bankrupted the nation, and so Richelieu, to solve his financial problems, decided to default on his government bonds. The value of Étienne’s investment dropped from 65,665 livres to less than 7,296.

Money makes the world go round, and this was also true in the seventeenth century. The aristocracy had their privileges, granted to them by birth and family history; the poor had almost nothing; the rising bourgeoisie had money, and money was slippery. The entire story of the events leading up to the French Revolution can be summed up in this truth. The seventeenth century was not merely the time in which science began to take hold, but also the time in which money began to take hold, to affect even the aristocracy in their complacent privileges. But it was the middle class, then as now, who always felt the pinch, who, unless they secured their money, could easily fall back into the nameless masses of the poor. Understandably, then, Étienne and the other investors grew disturbed over the cardinal’s decision. That March, in 1638, Étienne Pascal, the man of good breeding, the man of science and mathematics, the enlightened teacher, the socialite and intellectual, joined the other investors in a protest, which, as protests will, got out of hand. Someone made threats, and someone acted violently, and someone was openly seditious. The cardinal, in a snit, responded in kind and ordered his agents to gather them all up and throw them in prison. If Richelieu knew anything, it was how to put down protesters.

In full flight, Étienne left his children behind to be cared for by friends and by his domestic servants. Imagine the fear of his children: they had
lost their mother when they were only babies, and now their father, their only protector, had been forced to run for his life, or at least for his freedom. But the Pascals were fortunate in their friends, especially Madame Sainctot, who gathered the children around her and began to scheme for Étienne’s return and rehabilitation. The friends had one hold card. Blaise was not the only talented Pascal; his younger sister, Jacqueline, was an accomplished poet, and had been even as a child. She was a pretty child and, like Blaise, intelligent beyond her years, the kind of child who makes adults coo when they are anywhere nearby. She was also a sunny child, happy most of the time, at least according to her sister, Gilberte—though Gilberte cannot always be trusted, because she tended to idealize her family. But like her brother, Blaise, Jacqueline was also stubborn.

Her father had once assigned Gilberte the job of teaching Jacqueline to read, and for some time the little seven-year-old seemed impervious to her sister’s instructions. Then, by accident, Gilberte read Jacqueline from a book of verse, and it changed everything, for the little girl seemed captivated by the music and rhythm of the language. From that point on, it was easy. Four years later, along with the two daughters of Madame Sainctot, Jacqueline wrote and performed in a five-act play, written entirely in verse. The play was the talk of the fashionable ladies of Paris, and the sudden notoriety started the young Pascal on a literary career of her own.

In 1638, the king’s wife, Anne of Austria, conceived after twenty years of waiting, if not twenty years of trying. Her husband, Louis XIII, was a scrupulous man, and cold to nearly everyone, especially his wife. As was all too common in kings at that time, he didn’t like his wife very much. She had been foisted on him as a political choice, not because of any compatibility, but rather as a way of connecting the French throne to the all-powerful Hapsburgs. There is some doubt that he even consummated the marriage. No one would admit that, however, because it would have led to war. The people of Paris had begun to wonder if the king and queen would ever conceive. Mostly, they were simply frustrated with the royal pair: would they ever get around to doing their duty? At a time when producing a legitimate heir to the throne was the principal duty of any
king, this was an important question. No one had forgotten the endless dynastic wars that had beggared Europe throughout the Middle Ages.

But then, like Sarah the wife of Abraham, Anne came up pregnant just when the people were beginning to lose hope. This child would live to become Louis XIV, the Sun King, the man whose lavish lifestyle would set France solidly on the path of revolution. The court gathered around Anne to pamper her in her delicate condition and schemed to find diversions to keep her entertained. Unlike Louis, Anne was a party girl and had the reputation of someone who liked to have a good time. Just before he went fugitive, Étienne and his friends brought Jacqueline to court to read some of her sweet poetry in honor of the queen and her pregnancy. As expected, the little girl charmed both the king and queen, and both praised her and fawned over her, no doubt to the delight of her father.

This was the arrow that Étienne’s friends used against the cardinal. Sadly, soon after her triumph with the king and queen, Jacqueline contracted smallpox, a nightmare common enough in Europe throughout the seventeenth century, one that we have nearly forgotten in our time. Hanging near death for days, she struggled against the virus, while her father sat beside her bed. Slowly, she recovered, though her perfect face was marred by the scarring the disease left in its wake. Jacqueline later claimed that it was this loss of her beauty that was God’s greatest gift, for he took her off the worldly path that she had been set upon and set her on a new road that led more directly to God.

Then came the terrible month of March and the reversal of Étienne’s finances, the ill-conceived protest, and Étienne’s flight from the city. Étienne’s friends quickly wove the three children into their schemes. Jacqueline the charmer would be introduced to the cardinal and read a few poems to him that had been written in praise of him and his administration. The other children would look on as cherubs. It was cleverly done, for the cardinal was likely to be undone by the little poetess whose charms had only been added to by the tragedy of her illness. Could the cardinal not also see her as an orphan, now that her father had been forced to flee the city? Moreover, the cardinal had made a great enemy out of Anne of Austria, whom he never really trusted, since he reckoned that her loyalty
was more strongly directed toward her brother the king of Spain than it was to her husband, the king of France. Richelieu had a cruel tongue and had made Anne squirm under it more than once, and had done so in public. So how could Cardinal Richelieu allow his enemy the queen to show more compassion for the sweet Pascal girl than he did? And of course there were plenty of courtiers present to remind him of just that. Jacqueline played her part to the hilt; after reading her poems, she sat upon the cardinal’s lap, where he kissed her cheek and praised her over and over, calling her a sweet child and a wonderful poetess. It was just at this moment that Jacqueline leaned against the cardinal’s breast and asked a favor of him.
Please bring my father home
, she said.
He is most terribly repentant. Bring him home and you will see what a good servant you will have in him
. The rest of the court smiled on benignly, including some of the king’s and queen’s closest friends. The cardinal was caught like a fish. What else could he do?