Blaise Pascal biography

Dromo's Den

Blaise Pascal Biography

PASCAL, pas'kal', Blaise (1623–62). A distinguished French philosopher, mathematician, and author, born at Clermont-Ferrand. He came of an Auvergnat family, ennobled in 1478 and for generations employed in the civil service. His mother died in his infancy, and his father moved in 1631 to Paris. Here he was educated by his father and showed remarkable precocity in mathematics. In 1641 the family removed to Rouen, where for a number of years Pascal was engaged in scientific studies, especially in physics. In 1648 his sister Jacqueline was attracted to the Jansenist convent at Port-Royal, and Pascal frequently accompanied her there, till their father took them both to Clermont, where Pascal remained for two years. In 1650 the family returned to Paris, and the next year the father died; Jacqueline joined Port-Royal, but Pascal remained in Paris till 1654, when he followed her thither. His decision to embrace the austere life of Port-Royal is said to have been caused by a carriage accident, though it is quite clear from minor writings of this period, such as Prière pour demander le bon usage des maladies (1648) and Lettres sur la mort du père de M. Pascal (1651), that the Jansenist faith and what is uncritically called Pascal's skepticism were already firmly fixed in his mind. From this moment he gave himself utterly to Port-Royal, continuing to believe in and labor for the progress of science, though sure that mental and moral certitude could be found only in revelation. He was not then a theologian, and he never acquired more than a superficial acquaintance with the fathers of the Church. Yet, with the equipment of his unsurpassed literary instinct and scientific training, he entered on his famous controversy with the Jesuits in the 18 Lettres provinciales. They were published clandestinely and pseudonymously in 1656 and 1657. The title of the collected letters reads: Lettres écrites par Louis de Montalte à un provincial de ses amis et aux RR. PP. Jésuites; sur la morale et la politique de ces pères. Subsequently the collection was entitled simply Les provinciales. It is evident that they were written under intense excitement, stimulated by the supposed miraculous cure of his niece through contact with a relic of the crown of thorns at Port-Royal. The letters were immensely popular and successful, but brought down both ecclesiastical and civil censures upon the unknown author. They are perhaps the greatest masterpieces in the literature of irony; there is no trace of declamation or of indignation, only a contemptuous smile, an insinuation of sarcasm, which in the latest letters yields occasionally to a stern but not impassioned invective, less effectual and less agreeable than the earlier manner. Pascal's style is unsurpassed in graceful energy and brilliant wit. It lacks tenderness and melody, but has the characteristically French virtues of being sharp, clear-cut, compact, and yet full in its utterance. He is the first French prose writer thoroughly at home with rhetorical tools. There has been gradual adaptation to new needs, but French prose has neither made nor needed to make a great advance since the Lettres provinciales. Considered, however, from the point of view of honest controversy, they cannot be praised so highly. At best they are special pleadings and do not represent the general spirit of the Jesuit Order. Accurate scholarship has pointed out numerous passages which misquote or misapply the authors quoted, or distort an obiter dictum of some obscure Jesuit, sometimes even a proposition condemned by the society, into its official teaching. His colleagues at Port-Royal, especially Nicole, furnished materials and collected references, and others were taken from a Calvinist collection published at Geneva in 1632. Pascal's part was that of the earnest and convinced barrister who pleads a case from materials put into his hands by others. He himself said, it is true, that he had read Escobar through twice and had never used a passage from any author without having looked it up with its context. The real issue, however, is not between Jesuits and Jansenists, but between Puritanism and Probabilism. Pascal leads an ascetic reaction against the naturalism of the sixteenth century as we find it, on the one hand, in Rabelais and Montaigne, and, on the other, in Ronsard and the Classicists. This double movement of the Renaissance the Jesuits had sought to reconcile with Christianity by their ethics. Against this Pascal makes a Puritan and Augustinian protest, somewhat as Calvin had made it in a previous generation. The critic Brunetière thinks that Pascal made a mistake in scoffing at casuistics while he attacked Probabilism, and that in seeking to ruin the moral credit of the Jesuits he directed a blow against religion itself, which might have had serious consequences had it not been in some degree parried by Pascal’s second great work, Pensées sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (1670).

For Pascal had not yet finished Les provinciales when he conceived the idea of supplementing this destructive work of criticism by a constructive Apologie de la religion chrétienne, by which, of course, he meant Jansenism. At this he worked serenely, though with much physical suffering and some self-inflicted refinements of asceticism, until his death, in 1662. He left it little more than a series of disconnected fragments, published with omissions, alterations, and some errors of mere carelessness in 1670. A more exact text, edited by Faugère, appeared in 1844. The general idea of the work is obvious if we conceive it to be a book of Jansenist apologetics. Pascal urges the wretchedness of man in himself and in his environments, the impotence of reason, the protest of despair, the invincible hope of better destiny, the solution of the difficulty in the doctrine of original sin, and the consequences of the acceptance of that doctrine, viz., expiation and redemption, dogmas foreshadowed in the Old Testament, confirmed by miracles, forming the essentials of Christianity, and credible by an effort of will.

Pascal’s work in mathematics was also of considerable importance. He was the first one to attempt a philosophy of mathematics. When only 16 years old, he wrote a work on the Geometry of Conics (1639), most of which is lost, though a fragment has been restored from his correspondence with Leibnitz. It contained two important theorems, the one which is known as Pascal’s theorem (see Concurrence and Collinearity), and another, due to Desargues, that if a straight line cut a conic in P and Q, and the sides of an inscribed quadrilateral in A, B, C, D, we have the following relations: PA·PC QA·QC/PB·PD QB·QD In 1665 he published his arithmetical triangle, a device for determining the coefficients of the expansion (a + b)ⁿ. (See Pascal's Triangle.) The theory of probabilities (see Probability) assumed form under the hands of Pascal and Fermat (q.v.). Pascal’s last work dealt with a curve called by him the roulette and known later as the cycloid (q.v.).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XVIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 135-136.