Blaise Pascal (from Pensees, #199-233):
Imagine this:
A number of men are in chains, all condemned to death; each day some are slaughtered while the others watch; those who remain see their own condition in that of their fellows; they look at each other sadly, hopelessly, waiting for their turn.
That is a picture of the human condition.
You don’t need a very elevated soul to grasp that there’s no real and lasting satisfaction to be had here; that our pleasures are nothing but vanity; that our ills are infinite; and that death, which threatens us every moment, will a few years hence certainly confront us with the horrible necessity of being either annihilated or eternally wretched. There’s nothing more real than this, nothing more terrible. However much we put on airs of courage, that is the end awaiting the finest life in the world.
When I consider how short my life is, swallowed up in the eternity before and after it, and the smallness of the space that I occupy, and even of the space I can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces that I know nothing of and that know nothing of me, I’m frightened and astonished at being here rather than there; for there’s no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who put me here? Who assigned this place and time to me?
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
Our soul is thrown into the world of bodies, where it finds number, time, dimensions. It reasons about this, and calls it nature, necessity, and can’t believe in anything else. It’s important to our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal. It’s beyond doubt that the mortality or immortality of the soul must make all the difference in morality. Yet philosophers have developed their theories of morality without bringing this in. They think just to pass the time.
What reason have skeptics for saying that we can’t rise from the dead? Which is more difficult—to be born or to be resuscitated? For something that has never happened to happen, or for something that has happened to happen again? To come into existence or to return to it? One seems easy because it happens so often; we don’t see the other happening, so we think it is impossible. The thinking of the man in the street! Why can’t a virgin bear a child? What do they have to say against resurrection and against virgin birth? Which is more difficult, to produce a man or an animal or to reproduce it?
This is what I see and what troubles me. I look in every direction and see nothing but darkness everywhere. Everything that nature offers me is a subject for doubt and disquiet. If I saw nothing in nature pointing to a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw the signs of a Creator everywhere, I would remain peacefully in the faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I’m in a pitiful state in which I have a hundred times wished that nature, if a God is running it, would unambiguously testify to him, and that if the signs of him that it gives are deceptive it would suppress them altogether. I wish that nature would say everything or say nothing, so that I might see which way to go.
In my present state I don’t know what I am or what I ought to do. My heart inclines wholly to know where the true good is, so as to follow it; no price would be too high for me to pay for eternity. I envy those whom I see living in faith with such carelessness, making such a bad use of a gift that it seems to me I would use very differently. Incomprehensible that God should exist, and incomprehensible that he should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created; that original sin should be, and that it should not be.
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{Text respectfully edited}
The Philosopher, alone with his pensees
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