HAPPY BIRTHDAY BLAISE PASCAL, MATHEMATICAL GENIUS, CONVERT FROM INDIFFERENCE TO DEEP FAITH
THERE'S A NEW APOSTOLIC LETTER FROM THE POPE ON YOUR 400TH BIRTHDAY!
For a few years, I’ve been composing occasional birthday posts to be shared on the Dappled Things Facebook page. Because I usually am prompted by an email from Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, I only work on the posts on the day of the birthday, and lately, with a new busy social media editor, it has been hard for me to get them posted on time for her to post them on the DT FB page on the same day. So I’m moving future Happy Birthday posts here where I am better able to make sure they get posted on time
This is my first Happy Birthday post on this Substack. Blaise Pascal, the great genius mathematician and mystic who converted from religious indifferentism to deep Catholic faith after famously experiencing a night of fire, seems to be a perfect famous person to start with. As I learned from an email from Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, today is Pascal’s birth anniversary. And then I learned from Facebook friend Michael Liccione that the pope released an Apostolic Letter today titled SUBLIMITAS ET MISERIA HOMINIS (THE GRANDEUR AND MISERY OF MAN) in honor of the 400th anniversary of Pascal’s birth, with the comment, “Pope Francis has a very good ghostwriter.” You can see for yourself how good at this link.
From the Writer's Almanac (archived from June 19, 2017)
It’s the birthday of mathematician and mystic Blaise Pascal, born in Clermont, France (1623). He was homeschooled by his father, a mathematician who believed that children should absorb knowledge naturally rather than by studying. So he didn’t go to school in his youth, but he worked on geometric problems in the yard, while playing with sticks. When he was 12, he showed his father that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles. His father was shocked that he had figured this out on his own, and invited him to join in scientific discussions with other mathematicians. At 16, he published an article on the geometric properties of cones, and a few years later, he invented the first mechanical calculator.
Pascal’s family was not religious, but in 1646, he met two Christian mystics who cared for his father during an illness. They converted Pascal, and he converted his family, but he continued working on scientific experiments, showing that a vacuum could exist in nature, and invented the mathematics of probability.
Then, one night in November of 1654, he experienced a divine vision, which he called a “night of fire.” He wrote an account of the experience and sewed it into his coat lining to carry until his death. After that night, he decided to forget the world and everything except for God. He left Paris in 1655 and went to live in a convent. While living there, his niece was miraculously cured of an eye disease by touching a thorn from the crown of Jesus. He decided to write a book to convert skeptics to Christianity.
Pascal wrote a series of notes and fragments about his thoughts on religion, but he never completed the book. The notes were found after his death and published as Pensées (Thoughts, 1669). In that book, he describes his famous wager, arguing that if God does not exist, the skeptic loses nothing by believing in him; but if God does exist, the skeptic gains eternal life by believing in him. He also argued that it is the heart that experiences God, and not reason.”
The last paragraph above refers to Pascal’s wager. Here it is in his own words.
A game is on, at the other end of this infinite distance, and heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? . . . You have two things to lose: truth and good, and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness. And your nature has two things to shun: error and misery. Your reason does not suffer by your choosing one more than the other, for you must choose. That is one point cleared. But your happiness? Let us weigh gain and loss in calling heads that God is. Reckon these two chances: if you win, you win all; if you lose, you lose naught. Then do not hesitate, wager that He is.
Faith Needs Reason, Belief Needs Conversion of the Heart, PLUS I Suggest, Conversion of the Heart Needs Prayer from the Evangelizer
Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter, SUBLIMITAS ET MISERIA HOMINIS, says this about Pascal's views on reason and faith. "Pascal, who possessed the supernatural certitude of faith and considered it fully compatible with reason while infinitely surpassing the latter, sought as much as possible to engage in dialogue with those who did not share his faith. For “to those who do not have faith, we cannot give it except by reasoning, as we wait for God to give it to them by moving their heart”.
That point syncs up with my experience of conversion and of trying to lead others to belief. Even the best of reasons will not be accepted by an unbeliever unless God moves the heart. I want to add something from my experience about how hearts get moved.
In the mid-1970s, I was trying to finish my college degree after a divorce while raising my two children by myself, when I realized that Christians had more productive lives with fewer heartbreaks than the artsy immoral types I’d been attracted to after I left the Catholic Church. Hmm. Maybe God was not the big meanie stealing our joys that many around me believed? I started seeing Judeo-Christian sexual morality as a protection from harm, and I began trying out various Christian denominations. At a Methodist Church in downtown Minneapolis, I was amused by hearing a sermon that seemed rather pedestrian, because it was all about all the times that feet are mentioned in the Bible.
Then afterward in the church basement for coffee and donuts, while my children ran around wildly as was their wont, I met Jane Peterson. It turned out she was a fellow student at the U of MINN MPLS and was one of two pretty blonde daughters of a former mayor of Minneapolis. Jane was active in Campus Crusade for Christ, and so she invited me to start meeting with her for a Bible study, starting with the Gospel of John.
Were you ever frantic to impress someone who was of higher social standing that you are classy even though poor and then have something happen to foil you in a most humiliating manner? That happened to me, this way. We sat at the round dining table in my high-rise subsidized apartment in the complex named Cedar Square West on the West Bank of the Mississippi for our Bible study the first time we met. Then to my intense shame, while we were talking, a long brown cockroach fell from the light hanging over the table onto her open Bible and scurried away.
Even though I had seen cockroaches before, sometimes in swarms, in other inner city apartments around where I’d lived in Boston, New York, and San Francisco, I’d never a single one at Cedar Square West until that day.
I don’t think we met again. You can imagine what a gently raised mayor’s daughter must have told her family about the little martyrdom she experienced that day.
But the end result was better than you might imagine. At first, I thought I’d won the arguments I’d had with her about various doctrinal points, but afterward, I ended up believing what she had told me. I believe I accepted the reasons she had presented—because my heart was changed.
Where did my conversion of the heart come from? It may sound weird if you’ve never experienced this, but I could feel her praying for me. And I know that her prayers in addition to her zeal to help others and me know Christ are what helped me back to Christianity. Evangelical Christians take seriously what they call the Great Commission, which refers to the last words of Christ to his disciples immediately before His Ascension into heaven. “Go out and preach the Gospel to the whole creation.” Methodists nowadays aren’t big on evangelization, but campus groups like Campus Crusade for Christ have evangelization at their heart. God bless them.
In the current climate, preaching the Gospel is frowned upon by many Catholics who think that Vatican II put an end to trying to convert non-Catholics. It’s condemned by some as proselytizing. But if the complete revelation of God resides in Catholicism, why would you not share it? If you do, the fact is you can’t help bring people out of ignorance into belief without telling them what the Gospel is and explaining the reasons you know the faith is true.
I would add this suggestion. To help change a skeptical unbeliever from merely hearing the reasons why the Faith is true into a believer whose heart has been converted, the evangelist must bring loving prayer into the equation.
Jane Peterson, wherever you are, thank you! May God richly bless you for your efforts and prayers to help a cynical ex-bohemian ex-hippy type (as you may know, my children’s names are Liberty and Sunshine, so that gives you a clue), and help her come back to the faith of her childhood.
Eventually, after I tried out many Christian denominations, I was brought back into the Catholic Church because it has the Magisterium (the Catholic Church’s teaching authority), the Sacred Tradition (our sure guide to the meaning of the Scriptures), and the Eucharist, the True Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ. I may never know whose prayers helped me not settle for less than the fullness of the Faith and brought me the rest of the way back home.
More about the image above. “In 1658, Blaise Pascal had given up mathematics for theology but, while suffering from a toothache, began considering several problems concerning the cycloid. His toothache disappeared, and he took this as a heavenly sign to proceed with his research. “—From Wikipedia