Pascal’s decision to place the contradictory or undecidable quality of the human condition at the level of his thought and action rather than at the level of his being serves to indicate how the former bear a relation to a
function of freedom—to our capacity, that is, to base our actions not on any quantifiable or qualifiable Good, but rather on the judgment of an indeterminate absolute: the will of the hidden God. As we have repeat- edly witnessed, man’s grandeur is for Pascal a function of the ideal remnant of his union with the divine. Though we desire to be reunited with our first nature before our fall into concupiscence, we become aware of the unbridgeable distance which separates us from the divine. This distance renders illegitimate any justification for action premised on a criterion of human reason or a notion of individual, worldly intent. In order to conform to the inscrutable will of God, the Pascalian subject is strictly forbidden to act out of any motivation other than grace. So how precisely does an act of faith caused by grace come about? What finally motivates the believer to take the risk of engaging with a danger- ous, thoroughly ambiguous world, one which fails to provide the subject with any verifiable indication of what is to be done?
Perhaps the most surprising feature of the late-medieval and early- modern discourses on grace is that they are generally more concerned with the motivation, indeed the causation, of worldly human action than with the otherworldly question of eternal life. In essence, in other words, the doctrines of grace are theories of praxis. To conclude this chapter I wish to examine Pascal’s comments on the problematic of grace in order to determine how he draws the consequences of his believer’s devotion to an unarticulated divine will. To begin, some context: In the
Provincial Letters Pascal offers scathing criticisms of the inherent con- tradictions—resulting from a violation of reason’s limits—which ensue from all attempts, both Jesuitical and Thomist, to distinguish efficient from sufficient grace. The nonaligned first-person voice of the Letters presents the controversy as follows:
The Jesuits maintain that there is a grace given generally to all men, subject in such a way to free-will that the will renders it efficacious or inefficacious at its pleasure, without any additional aid from God, and without wanting anything on his part in order to act effectively; and hence they term this grace sufficient, be- cause it suffices of itself for action. The Jansenists, on the other hand, will not allow that any grace is actually sufficient which is not also efficacious; that is, that all those kinds of grace which do not determine the will to act effectively are insufficient for action; for they hold that a man can never act without efficacious grace.23
The Jesuitical conception assumes that grace is a function of a human will. If earthly human deeds ultimately decide on its efficaciousness,
grace becomes a function of a sensuous, individuated will: a will of the ego; of pleasure, as the narrator contends. In contrast, the Jansenist emphasis on efficiency subtends that only the will of God, unknowable to us, determines whether or not our actions result from grace. In con- sequence, the cause of a proper act of faith informed by grace must be undetermined by anything of the order of human experience or knowl- edge. Pascal argues that grace must be both sufficient and efficient— must come only from God and remain independent of human will—otherwise it does not qualify as grace at all. The coherence of the concept of grace requires that it be strictly confined to the indetermi- nate sphere of the divine, radically subtracted from the order of the human properly speaking.
Within the Jesuitical framework, however, the distinction between sufficiency and efficiency allows the casuist to preserve a notion of self- interested human volition, since grace only becomes effective as a func- tion of worldly action separated from, bearing no relation to, the will of God. According to the related Jesuitical doctrine of so-called actual grace, we may be held accountable only for those sins we knowingly commit; further, it is God himself who is accorded the responsibility of implant- ing that knowledge in us. Crucially, in order to exorcise the specter haunting this argument of a properly diabolical agent, one whose utter ignorance of sin would then justify any action whatsoever, casuistry is forced to posit that “God never permitted a man to sin without giving him previously a view of the evil which he contemplated.”24
Here we are returned to the logic of Pascal’s automaton, through which he denounced the agnostic’s “double consciousness,” split between an outward knowledge of and conformity with the law, and a disavowed indulgence in self-interested transgression. Similarly, casuistry first puts the onus on God for providing his subject with knowledge of sin, thereby creating a kind of alibi which allows for the possibility of an innocent transgression. At a second moment, however, the casuist casts this trans- gression under the shadow of guilt by retroactively giving the subject knowledge of its sin. In this way casuistry renders transgression tantaliz- ingly obscene by attributing to the subject the knowledge of its guilt. At the same time, the casuist withholds from this subject any sense of ulti- mate accountability for its action by qualifying the status of grace as human rather than divine. Notwithstanding the specious rationalizations that the casuist framework permits, the Jesuitical position is finally simply nonsen- sical for Pascal, for it first posits that grace issues only from God, thereby remaining indifferent to human moral considerations, but then subsumes grace under a properly human volitional efficiency which is then free to determine on its own terms the legitimacy of the act.
From Pascal’s perspective, what makes possible this perverse logic of casuistry is finally an unjustifiable certainty with respect to what constitutes sin. Though Pascal’s subject of faith experiences intuitions of guilt, these intuitions are radically untranslatable into knowledge: The hidden God refuses to make explicit how we have sinned or how we might achieve innocence. Grace may therefore only ever be postu- lated, never proven or guaranteed, as the cause of an act of faith. The fundamental call to praxis which underlies Pascal’s doctrine emerges as a result of this constitutive lack of knowledge which determines our relation to the Other. The content of the final judgment, paradoxically, is empty. If there is ultimately no way of knowing what God wants, the question of the causation of my act rebounds back to me, forcing me to interrogate the content of my own desire, daring me to purge this desire of any criterion whatever, of any possible reference to an ex- isting ethical norm. In this way Pascal’s notion of grace assumes that the world itself is lacking, is devoid of ontological consistency, and therefore creates the possibility of miraculous acts, acts which sim- ply cannot be accounted for by any known measure. But crucially, such possibilities are only visible to the subject who has already acquired faith. This subject has acknowledged the trauma of God’s silence and has acted anyway—acted in the absence of any frame- work, signpost or guarantee.
In his Pensées Pascal avers that grace properly conceived cures humankind of its two “chief maladies” (116): pride, the source of its alienation from God, which provides the illusion of certainty and which motivates the attitude of moral self-righteousness; and concupiscence, the cult of sensuous pleasure, which limits the ambitions of humankind to purely earthly concerns of self-preservation and advancement. Both afflictions fail to come to terms with the challenge posed by a properly unmotivated act purified of any reference to a supreme Good, including, perhaps especially, that of pleasure. At this point it finally becomes possible to answer my earlier question about the superficially problem- atic way in which Pascal’s concept of sin ties itself to pleasure, inciting in the process the contemporary skepticism about a latent, patently actually existing Christian puritanism. For ultimately, I would suggest, pleasure for Pascal is undecidable: It is as illegitimate to claim that pleasure is in itself always sinful, always alien to any act motivated by grace, as it is to do as the Epicurean libertine, who elevates pleasure into a kind of Urmaxim for action. “If you are united to God,” Pascal affirms, “it is by grace, not by nature,” drawing our attention to the supersensible attribute of grace. Grace does not present itself to us in experience and in consequence is not amenable to verification or prediction, to explanation
with reference to any determinate mode of causality, be it rational, natu- ral-empirical, or otherwise (116).
The Pascalian subject begins its struggle with itself in a state of guilty concupiscence. Incapable of coming to terms with the opacity of God’s will, and yet equally incapable of eradicating the stubborn rem- nant of its first nature, this subject seeks to disavow its very conditions through a surreptitious cult of transgression. Such a cult features the unconscious intent of provoking God into showing himself through an active participation in sin. As was the case with Gilles de Rais, sin be- comes the royal road to an assumed personal relationship with a re- vealed, consoling God. Through the apparatus of faith, however, the subject gains an exit from this logic of perversion, acquiring the ability to submit itself to the exigencies of conversion. Through conversion the subject reorients the causality of its actions with reference to the desire which inhabits them—to their relation, in other words, to the indetermi- nate will of God.
The act of faith, together with the gift of grace which is its cause, therefore performs two crucial functions. First, it prevents us from uncov- ering or revealing the hidden God—from filling out the mystery of his impenetrable will—a God who would otherwise demand our uncondi- tional allegiance and sacrifice, threatening to turn us into instruments of his sinister jouissance. But faith also inserts our act into a larger totality greater than ourselves and invisible to reason. In this way faith gives us a shock which breaks our allegiance to our egoistic self-interest and to the interests of our community of friendly neighbors with whom we identify, thereby integrating the act within the totality of the miraculous body of Christ. “Grace has not destroyed the law,” writes Pascal, “but has made it act” (142). To be sure, it will be said that Pascal’s theory ultimately fails to spell out the full consequences of the paradox of a fully atheistic faith, one which need not have recourse to a notion of signs communicated through a book of divine revelation. Ultimately, however, the properly theological framework of Pensées is in large measure incidental to Pascal’s evocation of the act of faith. Indeed, for me, Pascal’s final, timely, invalu- able message is that through faith you can become aware that miracles do
happen. And neither the application of your faculty of reason nor the attachment to your earthly pleasures will enable you to come to terms with their decidedly possible impossibility.
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