Blaise Pascal meets the Jews

Let us begin, curiously, by spending a little while in Poland. The opening stage direction of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (King Ubu) springs out from the wings of a text that cannot contain it, and, in short, it launches itself like a line of dialogue: The action takes place in Poland, that is to say nowhere, a rather unique case in which the italics of the theatrical meta-text imposed themselves as an utterance in their own right, weightier even than a well-wrought opening to a speech. Poland is a character as important as the others, with this curiosity that, on account of incessant wars and the extraordinary variations of its borders, it was never certain whether Poland was present, or not, on the maps of the world. Could one not almost venture the highly imaginary hypothesis that the Jewish humans, with their wandering tradition, themselves rendered a little wandering the very land they inhabited — at least until a tyrant invoked the radical right of soil and of the “good race”? France, a complex assemblage, born of a thousand wars across more than a thousand years, born of interminable religious conflicts, had more permanence than Poland — with which it was historically very closely tied — but with its dead too. It also had its Jews. One cannot help but notice that their presence in French literature, and in particular that literature charged with the shaping of the official language, is rather spectral. They too are, in a certain way, nowhere. They are no longer seen, except in a theater inspired by biblical events, until the nineteenth century, when Balzac’s Gobseck seems all by itself to gather up the clichés of the Hebrew usurer.¹

And yet there were indeed Jews, and for a long time, in flesh and blood, in France. Rashi — the brilliant and tireless encyclopedic commentator on the Torah and the Talmud, who was also a sturdy winegrower of the bishopric of Troyes at the start of the second millennium — did not hesitate to use words of Old French (the Loazim) to render a nuance of the Hebrew or to bring out an interpretation, and thus saved a little Old French.² The fact remains that King Charles IV, after numerous edicts restricting the rights of the Jews that stretched over roughly two centuries, decided about three centuries later, in 1394, on their definitive expulsion. They took refuge in the territories of the Pope, a certain number of them in Brittany,³ and so on. King Louis XIV himself knew that Jews still lived in the Empire, precisely in the French islands of America. Working with scarcely any respite at the construction of the Absolute of his power, he drove them out in 1683. The same treatment was, moreover, reserved for the Protestants by the famous revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Jansenists, finally, demonized on account of their too radical and paradoxical Augustinianism by the Jesuits — those great actors of the Counter-Reformation — were themselves reduced to the few hectares of the Port-Royal abbey. The non-Catholics became, in short, very other, faded away little by little, and their existence — to take up again this word as Shakespearean as it has become Derridean through the use suggested for it by the major philosopher of deconstruction — became spectralized, extra partibus, as Catholic theology says of the unbending priests removed from power.

As for Judaism, it was understood in common, apologetic theology to be the premonition — but the alienated premonition — of Christianity, which wrested from the Jews their own truth. Christianity is, for this ultra-majoritarian current, the truth of Judaism, a negative premise to be overturned or sublated in the trinitarian dialectical operation that, in the Holy Spirit, makes the truth of love burst forth like a fruit at last ripe. Judaism would be that archaic notch, that eternal caterpillar, unmetamorphosed if one may dare to put it so, which would stand, in short, at the door of the true symbolic. Thus there has remained — to shift anachronistically, just for a moment, eras and places — before the gate (Vor dem Tor) of the Law, Joseph K., the timeless hero of Kafka’s The Trial, a grandiose paradigm, both upstream and downstream of him, of this borderline life. This dialectic of alienation runs through Bossuet in his sermons and, in infinitely more majestic proportions, through Hegel, who, in his great encyclopedic gesture, recounts the Odyssey of Spirit, which, having set out from Greece, would arrive at Jena, that is, at the new Greece at last mended of the lacerations of the adventure of Spirit. In this Weltanschauung, Judaism would remain, for its part, lacerated therefore (as one rends the garment of the bereaved) and forbidden any becoming, any unfolding, forbidden any “fluttering about.” The life of a wingless cockroach, as in The Metamorphosis of the same insurmountable Kafka.

From Pierre Charron to Hugo Grotius, to Jean Boucher, to Puget de la Serre, or again François Garasse — names all a little forgotten — Verus Israel is the name of the Church delivered from the Jewish substratum or underground. How, under such conditions, could the Jews still have been visible? And the violence in France of the campaign against them, even if in fact it did not reach the virulence of the one they knew in the Spain of Isabella the Catholic, was no less radical for that. Did Racine, himself close to the Jansenists, composing his dreamy and shadowy Athalie, think of the Jews still living, until 1683, in the kingdom of France? By living, I mean concrete actors, “encounterable” in life, even if within the limits of the functions and territories that were grantable to them with a certain parsimony.

Pascal was an extraordinary exception. He concretely encountered the Jewish text, applying to it his logical arsenal.

The zealots of Port-Royal, faced with the “shreds” of the Pensées left by Pascal, imagined that an apologetic design would surely have ended up binding them, tying them up, or concatenating them, if at least the work had been completed and not interrupted. But Alain Vizier (Universidad de Puerto Rico, Mayagüez), in his profound article⁴ — to which I am greatly indebted for what follows in my text — is, I believe, quite right to see at least three reasons that stand against this putative apologetic edifice. I take them up here, formulating them just a little differently.

1/ This assimilation of the Pensées to the draft of a work that would be a sort of Apologie de la religion chrétienne (Apology for the Christian Religion) is purely conjectural. And in the opening of the Mémorial, Pascal insists greatly, like a thunderclap, on affirming that his God is the God of the Bible, of the Old Testament, the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and not that of the learned or of the philosophers. It is the patriarchs of the Bible whose authority Pascal claims. The design of an apology is thereby “improbabilized.” For Pascal, the Jews and Jewish theology do indeed exist. Pascal, moreover, invents the hidden God, Deus absconditus, as the Jews are no doubt a little hidden. The figure then takes on its full importance in Pascal, for, as he says: Figure, presence and absence. Apology is a monistic genre; Pascal, with his art of contrarieties, maintains everywhere and at all times the requirement of the double meaning.

2/ The apologetic design on the one hand — always supposed, and which presides over this reading — and the devices of language on the other: are they so easily superimposable? Can one align them thus, one upon the other? In other words, and this is the pivotal point, does Pascal, strictly speaking, engage in a hermeneutics? Alain Vizier does not think so, and, with less learning than his, I do not think so either. We shall have to return to it.

3/ There is, finally, in this bundle of “insurmountable” and “dangerous” contradictions — as it could be written at the time in order to make it pass for aberrant — something that makes rather improbable, on Pascal’s part, the project, even had it reached a more advanced state, of a synthesis of the harmonious apologetic type. Something thorny runs through it.

Before trying to clarify as far as possible the complexity of Pascal’s gesture with the Jews, one can observe the text of his text. Quite unlike all the apologists of his time — if one can class him for a moment, and no doubt wrongly, in that category — Pascal devotes, astonishingly, a very large massif of his Pensées to the Jewish texts, and a broad reflection on the Jews still occupies a formidable place there. The summit of this massif, its central glacier, is fragment 274:

Proofs of the two testaments at once To prove both at one stroke, one need only see whether the prophecies of the one are fulfilled in the other. To examine the prophecies, one must understand them. For if one believes that they have but one meaning, it is certain that the Messiah will not have come; but if they have two meanings, it is certain that he will have come in J.C. The whole question is to know whether they have two meanings. That Scripture has two meanings. Which J.C. and the apostles have given, of which here are the proofs. 1. Proof by Scripture itself. 2. Proofs by the Rabbis. Moses Mammon [Maimonides] says that it has two sides, prov(ed), and that the prophets prophesied only of J.C. 3. Proofs by the Kabbalah; 4. Proofs by the mystical interpretation that the Rabbis themselves give of Scripture. 5. Proofs by the principles of the Rabbis, that there are two meanings. That there are two comings of the Messiah, glorious or abject according to their merit; that the prophets prophesied only of the Messiah — the law is not eternal, but must change at the coming of the Messiah — that then the Red Sea will be remembered no more — that the Jews and the gentiles will be mingled) (6. Proofs by the key that J.C. and the apostles give us of it.)

One must read this exceptionally long fragment with the right focus, with the right perspective so to speak, and not let oneself be “impressed” by the sum of references and by the effect of enumeration or of elliptical accumulation (almost a scree slope here), from which one might expect that it conceals a hidden logical order, absconditus.⁵ The thought of the fragments — as if protected from an absolutely sure interpretation — almost demands, in analysis, the approach of an archaeologist. Each is a stone that must be observed slowly, with circumspection and without any prejudice. Many great authors criticized him in the name of “liberty”: Voltaire; Nietzsche, who even judged that Pascal lost half his genius in these considerations; Paul Valéry, who proclaimed his horror of the gesture of convincing; and many others. All read these Pascalian aeroliths with too much haste and saw in them the traditional gesture of the invitation, almost frenzied, to conversion. And yet, following Alain Vizier, who has the right “tempo of thought” — to take up the title of Pascal Loraux’s very fine book — it is, as it were, the very opposite. One finds in this fragment no interpretation, no hermeneutics. No exegetical principle is indicated in it. Still following his great principle of contrarieties (see the note at the end of the article), he proposes neither the reconciliation of the religions nor the subordination of one to the other. It is the opposite of the magisterial dialectic of the Hegelian type, which ceaselessly turns over and harrows concepts into their contraries, and which, given the absolute system proposed, turned over just as readily the Pascalian contrarieties that Hegel saw as “alienated” exteriorities in their other and the figure.⁶

Pascal does not proceed thus, or is indifferent to any overcoming; he “simply” follows a logical and demonstrative order, as Alain Vizier just as simply notes, and means to demonstrate the proofs of the two Testaments. No proof of existence is advanced, nor even so much as envisaged. Many of the Pensées make this explicit: 781 and 3. Thought 449 affirms it without any ambiguity: “And that is why I shall not here undertake to prove, by natural reasons, either the existence of God, or the Trinity, or the immortality of the soul, nor any of the things of this nature […].” It took Paul Valéry a little blindness to imagine Pascal a “converter.” Nothing is further from his gesture.

Pascal criticizes the interpretive procedures (Augustinian or rabbinic, without favoring one or the other). Nietzsche is paradoxically wrong as well to consign Pascal summarily to the gesture of apology, for, in short, Pascal uses in his own way the genealogical method that Nietzsche generalized: it is a matter of weighing, of evaluating, of establishing fields of force, planes of immanence “Spinozisto-form” — in any case Spinoza as Deleuze read him — in short, of seeking out what Pascal always did: the reasons, be they those of effects, of figures, or of theological forms, so that one can indeed prove the two testaments “at once,” as Pascal writes at the beginning of the great fragment. For there is a double meaning, and this, instead of being the object of a hermeneutics that would necessarily induce the alienation of one religion to another, in a symbolic rivalry, is founded simply on history, and on a “dated saying,” as Alain Vizier puts it. Pascal here lifts the weight of theology — which is so often a source of war — and invents a historical anthropology that does not come to reconcile the two religious forms, but to bring them to cohabit. Pascal is here between Montaigne and Montesquieu. Did he so thoroughly waste his time, as Nietzsche asserts, once again “with hammer blows”?⁷ “Converting his libertine” — the addressee that has sometimes been supposed for Pascal — is decidedly not his object, quite the contrary, any more than demonstrating, or even illustrating, the superiority of Christianity over Judaism, which on the contrary piques his sagacity.

One may recall the very famous preface (1670) — of a tolerance most rare for the period, and even for today — to the first edition of the Pensées, which has an air of Montesquieu about it:

“Pascal then has a man [supposed to have lived in a general ignorance, in indifference toward all things] traverse the whole universe and all the ages, in order to make him notice an infinity of religions that are met with there; but he makes him see at the same time, by reasons so strong and so convincing, that all these religions are filled only with vanities, follies, errors, aberrations and extravagances, that he still finds in them nothing that can satisfy him. At last he has him cast his eyes upon the Jewish people, and makes him observe in it circumstances so extraordinary that he easily draws his attention. After having represented to him all that this people has of singular, he dwells particularly on making him notice a unique book by which it governs itself, and which comprises all together its history, its law and its religion.”

Pascal, who is a Christian, admits that the truth of their testimony would escape the Jews (who would thus not have entered sufficiently into the symbolic space, but would have remained at its door); he therefore sees in this not a source of dialectical overcoming, as all the other “apologists” imagined, such as Hegel, but a contradiction internal to Judaism, which after all is not a system, and perhaps not a religion, but a civilization, a “form of life,” as Wittgenstein would say. This contradiction is, in short, a contrariety, which is at bottom not displeasing to Pascal, whose very great merit in this massif of the Pensées was to imagine the Jews living, in short, “somewhere,” and not alienated from themselves.

End-note on the notion of “contrariety”

The concept of contrariety — which is no doubt baroque in nature, like many aspects of the era in which Pascal lived (see also Nicholas of Cusa) — runs through all the Pensées, and it would be quite presumptuous, in a note, to give a sufficient definition of it. First, two examples.

Thought 41: “Too much and too little wine. Give him none: he cannot find the truth. Give him too much: the same.”

Thought 262: the Jews: “What could they do?” Predestination is transformed into a dilemma. “Receiving Christ or rejecting him, they prove Christ, hence without choice, and yet guilty.”

No doubt one could see in it a paradoxical mode, almost a contrarian one. Everything that is received is, as it were, taken on the back foot (the word of the commentator Claude Morali), or treated with a hyperbolic and even contradictory irony, on the edge of bad faith; it is not surprising that the Hegelian “machine” should see in it the premise of the idealist dialectic which, for the German philosopher of Jena, turns over and sublates all concepts. The example is famous (Hegel’s Logic, the part devoted to the doctrine of being). Being is at bottom nothingness — what difference is there in their constituents? The first circulates in the second, which circulates in the first (one can say no more of the one than of the other), and is at last raised up — sublated, in Derrida’s formula — into a new category: becoming.

Pascal is not a pre-dialectician: his aim is, in his turn, to loosen the grip of the principle of non-contradiction that comes from Aristotle’s logic. He says it very obviously in Pensée 177, a major thought: “Neither is contradiction a mark of falsehood, nor is non-contradiction a mark of truth.” In fact, the two opposed terms are in an incessant circuit, each remembering the other. Fragment 576: “The two contrary reasons — one must begin there, otherwise one understands nothing, and everything is heretical; and even at the end of each truth, one must add that one remembers the opposite truth.” It is therefore not the golden mean, the old ideal, strictly speaking. One must touch the two extremities. It is of course the most illustrious: “Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that whoever would play the angel plays the beast.” The two extremities are indeed touched. Life is indeed contrarian, and no reconciliation, of the dialectical type therefore, is to be hoped for. Is there not here something close to certain Jewish principles — at times contrarian — which, for example, ask one to begin with the impossible and even to hold fast to it? What Pascal lacks is the Law — he had faith in its place — which he sought everywhere, and with an incomparable genius in science. Of all the philosophers of his time, Pascal was the least dialectical, and, from this point of view, without necessarily knowing it, the closest to the Jews.

Notes