Pascal: Reasoning and Belief by Michael Moriarty (review)
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The Pensées is a difficult book. When originally published in 1670, eight years after Pascal’s death, it was simply a collection of “thoughts” or pensées found among his papers after his death. Modern editors have based their editions on two seventeenth-century copies that group many of the fragments into thematic groups that purport to reflect Pascal’s own organization. Even so, the Pensées is still a collection of fragments. The reader, particularly the first-time reader, needs a guide.
It was well known among his friends that Pascal was working on an apology for Christianity. In Pascal: Reasoning and Belief, Michael Moriarty is attempting both to recover Pascal’s plan for this apology and to offer a philosophical examination of his program, to determine “whether what he says has any claim to be regarded as true” (vii). Moriarty’s project is threefold: to figure out what the general shape of Pascal’s apology was supposed to be, to examine in some detail the sequence of steps that make up the apology, and to subject each of those steps to philosophical scrutiny.
Using fragments from the Pensées and contemporary reports of Pascal’s lectures, Moriarty proposes a reconstruction of the general outline of Pascal’s apology. According to Moriarty, Pascal’s apology begins with an “anthropology,” an account of human nature without God (82). The unbeliever will then be led to Christianity by showing that, of all religions, only Christianity can explain our unhappiness without God and promise us “true [End Page 506] happiness.” This in turn should lead the unbeliever to investigate the claims of Christianity more seriously. This cannot give unbelievers faith, but it can lead them to the edge of faith (79–82, 252–54, 313–15).
After a series of introductory chapters, Moriarty goes through Pascal’s anthropology, following closely the sequence of topics in the carefully ordered copies of the papers. Here Moriarty discusses in detail topics familiar to the reader of the Pensées: the influence of custom, the apparent irrationality of human life, the importance of diversions to distract us from our unhappiness, the hint of a greatness that we once had but that we lost at the Fall. Following this is an examination of the argument that only Christianity can explain our present unhappiness (chapters 5–14). Here then begins the second part of the project, helping the unbeliever seek God. Here Moriarty discusses Pascal’s conception of the hidden God, the role of reason in the project, reading the Bible, coming to knowledge of the heart and true faith, and the Wager (chapters 15–19).
These chapters are not merely exegetical, though the exegesis of Pascal’s fragments is no small thing. Moriarty also wants to determine the extent to which the positions Pascal takes are defensible by philosophical standards. Consider, for example, Moriarty’s discussion of the Fall. After discussing Pascal’s sources in Scripture and St. Augustine, he offers a lengthy discussion of what is distinctive about Pascal’s interpretation of the Fall and a number of alternative perspectives on the issue from religious thinkers and philosophers, including Ricoeur, Voltaire, C. S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, and John Cottingham (170–88). Similarly, in the discussion of the idea of a hidden God, Moriarty brings in discussions of the issue in recent analytic philosophy of religion (274–79). In exploring the validity of Pascal’s claims, Moriarty appeals to a wide variety of sources, ancient and modern, analytic and contemporary European.
Moriarty leaves the famous Wager argument for the end of the book. He offers a good analysis of the argument and an extensive discussion of the principal objections that have been made against it. But what is most interesting is the discussion of where the Wager goes in the project of the apology. Interestingly, the Wager itself is not found in either of the carefully ordered copies that form the basis of current editions, but in a bundle of unclassified papers. Moriarty seems most sympathetic to the view...
