Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the Pensees.

Williams, Timothy J.

Wetsel, David. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994. xv + 409 pp. Cloth, $69.95--The principal aim of Wetsel's study is to identify the potential interlocutor(s) for whom Pascal intended his Pensees. Wetsel begins by stating his belief that, despite the fragmentary state of the Pensees, Pascal had clearly intended to revise and organize his thoughts into a "finished apology of the Christian religion" (p. 1). Those unfamiliar with the current state of Pascalian studies in North America will be surprised to learn how controversial is such a thesis. In this Derridian era, with its endless fascination with discontinuity and fragmentation, a practically subatomic reading of the Pensees has become de rigueur. Wetsel's book is an unabashed return to the historicocritical tradition. Chapter 1 ("Pascal and the Unbelievers) exposes the principal anti-Christian theses current in midseventeenth-century Paris, centering on the works of philosophes libertins such as La Mothe le Vayer and Gabriel Naud. More radical atheistic works, such as those of Cyrano de Bergerac, are also discussed at length. Wetsel attempts to demonstrate that Pascal is not addressing these libertins erudits, whose arguments against Christianity leave hardly any trace in the Pensees. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the "skeptical religion" popular in seventeenth-century France. Wetsel maintains that this deism with neo-Pelagian elements, essentially the religion of the honnete homme, is the disbelief of those whom Pascal wishes to convert. The following chapter deals with the most important of the unorthodox versions of the Genesis story advanced during the Classical period in France, the works of Isaac de la Peyrere. Wetsel does not propose that Pascal, though familiar with the Pre-Adamite theory of La Peyrere, intended a specific refutation of this author. Rather he believes that a general examination of seventeenth-century heterodoxy provides the fundamental historical context essential for understanding Pascal's defense of orthodoxy.

The third chapter ("Pascal and the Non-Christian Religions") discusses a quite different historical context of the Pensees, that of the nascent modern study of comparative religions. Wetsel demonstrates not only how relatively little Pascal knew of Islam, but also how little Pascal is really interested in non-Christian religions. Nevertheless, the preoccupations of Port-Royal (such as the attack on the Jesuit mission to China) are illuminated by this chapter, which provides the crucial theological context for Wetsel's reading of the Pensees. Chapter 4 is the real heart of Wetsel's book. In it, he attempts to answer two questions: (1) What is the relationship between Pascal's celebrated "wager" (fragment 418 of the Lafuma edition, whose ordering of the Pensees is followed by Wetsel) and the preface of the Apology partially sketched in fragment 427? (2) To what extent does the portrait of the wagering libertin of this fragment correspond to the unbeliever pictured in the Preface adumbrated by fragments 427-9? Wetsel concludes that there is clear indication of Pascal's intended reader: those unbelievers who are still seeking the truth. In the final chapter, Wetsel argues that Pascal's division of disbelief into "hardened" and "alterable" varieties is grounded in the Augustinian doctrine of predestination and election. For Pascal, hardened skepticism is so irrational as to amount to a kind of insanity, which will nevertheless be useful for instructing and convincing those still capable of conversion. This explains the crucial importance of representations of hardened disbelief in Pascal's Pensees, a work which Wetsel convincingly restores to the status of an uncompleted Apology of the Christian religion. Except in a few footnotes, all quotations from French sources are accompanied by very accurate and thoughtful English translations. Though the scholarly edifice of this work will impress any expert on Pascal, major portions of Wetsel's eminently readable study will prove utterly engrossing for even the casual reader of the Pensees.