Pascal's Perfect Contradiction. (02/07/2002)
Christian ideology has always maintained an unshakable commitment to the idea that its faith is completely free of any taint of contradiction. This self-image arose in the early centuries of its migration from Palestine into the wider world of Mediterranean culture, specifically with respect to its confrontations with Greek philosophy. On the one hand, Christian theologians recognized the fact that a belief system derived from the immutable word of a perfect and all-powerful God must exist in a pure state absolutely devoid of contradiction. At the same time, and on the other hand, the contradictions that did exist in Christian ideology were both noticed and pointed out to advocates of the "new" religion by Greek philosophers in places like Antioch and Athens when the apostles began preaching in those cities. As Christian theologians learned techniques of argument from their Greek antagonists, they began to cite examples of contradiction in pagan philosophy and religion as proof that those ideologies were false and unreliable. Many of the examples cited by Christian fathers pit one pagan philosopher against another, Zeno (Stoic) against Epicurus, for instance, or point to a single individual who changed his point-of-view from youth to old age. Hence, differences between two competing schools of philosophy demonstrate that both are false and any change in a philosophical position over time indicates that it cannot preserve truth.
What this pattern of thinking created, of course, was a climate of intellectual repression in the Christian community that prevented any effort to revise or revoke any of the truly illogical or contradictory ideas that inhabited its ideology. Instead of revision, which equaled an admission of falsehood, the early church came to favor the expulsion of anyone who offered a view that differed from accepted orthodoxy. Tertullian, around 260 AD, virtually codified, even canonized, the idea that any novel concept, which is one he defined as being external to Scripture or outside the works of the Fathers, was equivalent to heresy. After Tertullian's argument for recognizing heresy by its novelty became law, anyone who attempted to revise doctrine was subjected to excommunication initially and later to execution as the church amassed and solidified its dominion over civil authority. This concept of heresy, and the power the church accumulated over time to enforce it, made it possible for churchmen to claim that a number of ideas, ones which have always existed in Western ideology, possessed truth-preserving qualities, because of their longevity, that they may not have deserved on the simple ground of their own logic.
An early Christian apologist, Athenagoras (177 AD), for instance, in his attempt to refute charges that Christians were practicing cannibalism because of the sacramental ritual of the Mass, stated that "these things are only idle tales and empty slanders, originating in the fact that virtue is opposed by its very nature to vice, and that contraries war against one another by a divine law." (A Plea for the Christians, Chapter III). The idea that there is a "divine law" which causes opposite qualities to "war against one another" is one that has always found a home in Christian ideology. Blaise Pascal, for instance, in the 17th Century, claims that Christianity is a "strange" religion because its ideology insists that
"man recognize that he is vile, even abominable, and bids him desire to be like God. Without such a counterpoise, this dignity would make him horribly vain, or this humiliation would make him terribly abject." (Pensees, part 537)
Pascal asserts earlier that
"There is internal war in man between reason and the passions. . . . [and] having both, he cannot be without strife, being unable to be at peace with the one without being at war with the other. Thus he is always divided against and opposed to himself." (412)
Pascal, of course, equates reason with virtue and passion with vice, suggesting that, by following the first, man places himself on a path to becoming "like God;" whereas, because people also act on the basis of their uncontrollable passions, which reduce them to the level of brute beasts, they are just as likely to fall into the humiliation associated with human sin and viciousness. The idea that human beings were deliberately created by God to suffer this endless war against themselves, being predisposed on the one hand to desire virtue but condemned on the other to achieve only vice, seems a cruel and vicious joke perpetuated by an all-powerful Deity against a powerless creature. A point to take here, even if no Christian theologian would ever embrace it, is simply to admit that the idea of this radical dualism in human nature is an unfortunate philosophical gaffe that no amount of rationalization (like claiming the dualism exists to preserve our freedom of choice) can correct or conceal. The idea has always been an unexamined part of a Christian landscape where to propose a revision in the ideology would constitute a novelty of thought condemned as heretical and one even punishable by execution during much of the Faith's recent history.
Pascal supports his view of human duality by suggesting it is a component of natural reality when he argues that "[n]ature has some perfections to show that she is the image of God, and some defects to show that she is only His image" (580). Since human beings are part of nature, at least in some less radical views of Christian ideology, where in others people are perceived as existing above or outside nature, we suffer both the same, or similar, perfections and imperfections that deform natural reality. Pascal does not make a list of either quality so that saying what they are, or what they might be, becomes a matter of speculation. Given his historical proximity to the emergence of scientific inquiry, and the fact that he agonizes over the changes in cosmology occasioned by Kepler and Galileo (205, 206, 229), one can guess he sees Kepler's elliptical planetary orbits, as opposed to Ptolemy's perfectly circular ones, as a sign of the defects that exist in nature. The fact that only certain forms, circles but not ellipses or squares, are worthy of God's perfection makes it possible to posit the existence of all kinds of other things that also fall short of a presumed ideal world. Put the way Pascal says it, being "only" the image of God means that natural forms, which cannot exist except as they are, must necessarily be less perfect than God. While that view is perfectly consistent with the ideology of creationism, it implies that the cosmos was once circular, if not also perfect in God's image, but either decayed of itself or was deformed by some supernatural force that meant it ill. The Newtonian and Einsteinian views that planetary orbits have always been elliptical are ones that reside outside the limits of religious thought and as such make the world out to be what it is rather than what a theologian wishes it were.
From a native American point-of-view, the idea that people are radically divided into warring opposites of good and evil, reason and passion, nobility and baseness, simply makes no sense at all because we generally do not embrace the notion that people should aspire to become more than what they are. We are mortal and do not aspire to achieve immortality. We are natural and do not aspire to become supernatural. We are unified in our humanness, are at peace, not at war, with ourselves, and do not expect to become God because the "best" half of an imaginary duality wins the war against an equally imaginary "worst" part of our nature. Seeking balance and unity, not conflict and war, internally transforms the external world into a reflection of who we are and what we seek. Projecting conflict and strife from the inside out transforms the world into exactly what it has become. The internal war Pascal champions, simply because human expectations are always fulfilled, has become the external war that defines and determines the course of European destiny. Put simply: you always only get what you wish for.