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Eleven days in the life of Pascal: 1658, the unfinished symphony

2023-03-31T04:14:30.569Z


FIGARO HORS-SÉRIE (9/11) - Almost two years ago, Pascal embarked on a project to defend the Christian religion. He makes a presentation of it at Port-Royal des Champs.


This article is taken from the

Figaro Hors-Série Blaise Pascal, the heart and the reason.



The news of the miraculous recovery of little Périer caused a stir.

If some had gritted their teeth, others had found themselves upset.

Among them, Pascal.

This rational mind had seen with his own eyes that everything could not be explained by the laws of nature.

And that if, beyond these laws, there really existed such brilliant manifestations of God's mercy, they had to be announced to the world.

It was the occasion, told his sister Gilberte, which gave birth to this extreme desire he had to work to refute the main and strongest reasonings of atheists

”.

While he continued to write the last

Provinciales

, Blaise then undertook to record his conceptions of man, of his life, and of God, on sheets of all sizes.

In the spring of 1658, he made a presentation at Port-Royal des Champs of a major project for the defense of the Christian religion, of which his relatives would discover after his death the sketch in the disconcerting state of some eight hundred almost illegible fragments, classified by bundles, of which twenty-seven provided with a title, and thirty-four without title.

Read alsoThe editorial of Le Figaro Hors-série: Blaise Pascal, a man for eternity

We believe we hear Pascal reasoning, arguing, often with a biting irony… Faced with strong minds who refuse to submit to the idea of ​​a redeeming God, he does not launch into metaphysical demonstrations.

No philosophical or scholastic paraphernalia: he considers it of little help in shaking the wall of their indifference and their prejudices.

If, on the other hand, he managed to make them lose a little of their pride by making them consider the impasse in which they find themselves, prey to the nostalgia of a greatness that they will never reach, but which they carry in spite of everything the indelible trace, and which calls them to go further than themselves...


A fallen king, that is what man is, who harbors within him forever the regret of a happiness that flees like a chimera!

A madman, who prefers to forget his finitude.

A condemned prisoner whose end speaks of the misery of his condition: “

The last act is bloody, however beautiful the comedy may be in all the rest.

We finally throw earth on the head, and there you have it forever.

»

Virtuoso, the first part of his

Apology

will sketch the portrait of a contradictory, enigmatic man, endowed with as much grandeur as misery.

Secondly, Pascal will wonder what can account for this contradiction, and what discourse on man is credible.

No other convinces him but that of the Christian religion, which reveals to man both his weakness and his greatness, embodied in Christ.

After reviewing the pagan, Mohammedan, Jewish religions, Pascal praises the only one that is true in his eyes, brings together "Proofs

"

of Moses and Jesus Christ, studies the phenomenon of miracles and deepens morality , going so far as to define the specificity of the Christian God:

the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Christians is a God of love and consolation;

he is a God who fills the souls and hearts of those whom he possesses;

it is a God who makes them feel interiorly their misery and his infinite mercy, who unites himself to the depths of their soul, who fills it with humility, joy, confidence, love;

which renders them incapable of any other end than of itself.

» Blaise strives to awaken in his libertine friends the desire for faith, and exhorts them to come out of their existential laziness: «

I would soon have left the pleasures, they say, if I had faith.

And I say to you: You would soon have faith, if you had left pleasures.

But it's up to you to start.

»

After Pascal's death, Florin and Étienne Périer would transcribe the fragments and try to order them by theme, which would give, in 1670, the first print run of the Pensées de M. Pascal

sur

la religion et sur les personnes pluss.

It was not until 1950, from the copies made on the writer's death and with the discovery of the bundles, that Louis Lafuma restored Pascal's disconcerting order and the vast symphony of Thoughts in

which

the musical motifs intertwine, the themes repeat themselves, with incessant variations.

Let it not be said,” he wrote, “that I said nothing new: the arrangement of the materials is new.

So new that it continues, almost four centuries apart, to captivate anyone who approaches its impressive edifice.

Blaise Pascal, heart and reason

, 164 pages, €13.90, available on newsstands and on

Le Figaro Store

.

Cover after the posthumous portrait of Blaise Pascal by François II Quesnel, after 1662 Figaro-Hors-Série

Source: lefigaro

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