Part 4: Against Indifference
Part 4: Against Indifference
Introduction In his award-winning book, The Moviegoer (1961), Walker Percy presents Binx Bolling as a 30-year-old who embarks on a quest – “a harebrained search for authenticity.” When asked about the nature of the search, he responds, “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” Does this fully explain why so many refuse to engage in the search? Why so much indifference to the search?
Walker Percy 1916-1990
Pascal’s Pensée (163/200) “A man in a dungeon, not knowing whether sentence has been passed on him, with only an hour left to find out, and that hour enough, once he knows it has been passed, to have it revoked. It would be unnatural for him to spend that hour not finding out whether sentence has been passed but playing piquet (card game).”
The Meaning of Indifference • Indifference, n., “absence of feeling for or against, hence, especially, absence of care for or about a person or thing; want of zeal, interest, concern, or attention; unconcern, apathy” (OED). • Jesus said to Peter, James, and John, “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me” (Mt. 26:38). He found them sleeping three times (vss. 40,43,45). • Pascal’s Reflection: “Jesus seeks some comfort at least from his three dearest friends, and they sleep; he asks them to bear with him a while, and they abandon him with complete indifference, and with so little pity that it did not keep them awake even for a single moment.”
Indifference in Jane Eyre “With this announcement he [Mr. Rochester] rose from his chair, and stood, leaning on the marble mantelpiece: in that attitude his shape was seen plainly as well as his face; his unusual breadth of chest, disproportionate almost to his length of limb. I am sure most people would have thought him an ugly man; yet there was so much unconscious pride in his port; so much ease in his demeanor; such a look of complete indifference to his own external appearance; so haughty a reliance on the power of other qualities, intrinsic or adventitious, to atone for the lack of mere personal attractiveness, that, in looking at him, one inevitably shared the indifference, and, even in a blind, imperfect sense, put faith in the confidence.”
Observation of Colson At His Watergate Trial
Chuck Colson 1931-2012
“Years of listening to sordid tales of theft, murder and rape desensitizes the dark-suited bailiffs and clerks, who have learned to discipline themselves to conscious indifference. Like mechanical men oblivious to emotion of the human world about them, they move about the court, passing papers, transcribing, escorting witnesses.”
Who Is Pascal Addressing in His Pensées? In his Pensées, Pascal is not addressing “the honest doubter…but nor is it the hardened sinner; by worldly standards the cultured devotee of self-interest, ruled by pride, may be offending neither the law of the land nor even social convention. Much of Pascal’s initial argument is, however, designed to make him see that he is harming himself, let alone breaking the law of God whose existence is yet to be proved. The so-called libertines were motivated not so much by hostility as by indifference with regard to religion, and only by piercing their carapace (the hard body-shell of tortoises) of complacency can Pascal touch the vital organ, the heart.” - A.J. Krailsheimer
“The Carapace of Complacency”
Pascal’s question: How can I pierce the carapace of complacency and touch the vital organ, the heart?
• “Never before has skepticism had such a brilliant halo around its head. There is a glory about ‘not knowing’” (Ravi Zacharias). • “Skepticism says that nothing can be known with complete certainty, and that the only sensible thing is neither to affirm nor deny anything” (John Blanchard). • “You are unwilling to come to Me, that you may have life” (Jesus; Jn. 5:40).
Skepticism Is Self-Contradictory “They all amount to saying that it is true that there is no truth, or we can know that we cannot know, or we can be certain that we cannot be certain, or it is a universal truth that there are no universal truths, or you can be quite dogmatic about the fact that you can’t be dogmatic, or it is an absolute that there are no absolutes, or it is an objective truth that there is no objective truth.” Dr. Peter Kreeft
Philosophy Professor, Boston College 1937 -
- Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Before one attacks and criticizes Christianity, at least know what it is. Pascal: “Let them at least learn what this religion is which they are attacking before attacking it.” • Christianity’s Claim: It has “a clear sight of God and plain and manifest evidence of his existence.” Effective Objection: “There is nothing to be seen in the world which proves him so obviously.” • God is Deus absconditus, the hidden God. This means: (1) “God has appointed visible signs in the Church so that he shall be recognized by those who genuinely seek him;” and (2) God “has none the less hidden them in such a way that he will only be perceived by those who seek him with all their heart.”
Proving God’s Existence • “It is very difficult to produce arguments at the popular level for the existence of God. And many of the most popular arguments seem to me invalid” (C.S. Lewis). • “God’s existence not only cannot be proved, it should not be attempted. God is not the final point of a ten-point proof but the one on whom all meaning rests” (Os Guinness). • “God’s existence can neither be conclusively proved nor disapproved” (Alister McGrath). • “In the final analysis there either is a God or Gods or there are none. There either is something or someone ultimate apart from me or there is not” (R.C. Sproul).
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • If they are not concerned about seeking the truth, why do they protest that God doesn’t show himself to them? • If they are really going to attack Christianity, “they would have to protest that they made every effort to seek it everywhere.” Even if they didn’t find the truth as the Church teaches it, in order to be intellectually honest, they would have to investigate there also. • Pascal knows how people behave regarding the truth. “They think they have made great efforts to learn when they have spent a few hours reading some book of the Bible, and have questioned some ecclesiastic (pastor, priest, minister) about the truths of the faith.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Even when they boast that they have sought the truth by reading books and talking with others, Pascal answers, “such negligence is intolerable.” • Why this indifference??? “The immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us, affecting us so deeply, that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter.” • Pascal’s distinction: “I make an absolute distinction between those who strive with all their might to learn and those who live without troubling themselves or thinking about it.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • What about those who sincerely doubt? “I can feel nothing but compassion for those who sincerely lament their doubt, who regard it as the ultimate misfortune, and who, sparing no effort to escape from it, make their search their principle and most serious business.” • What about those who never think about death? “As for those who spend their lives without a thought for this final end of life and who, solely because they do not find within themselves the light of conviction, neglect to look elsewhere, and to examine thoroughly whether this opinion is one of those which people accept out of credulous simplicity or one of those which, though obscure in themselves, none the less have a most solid and unshakeable foundation: as for them, I view them very differently.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Pascal’s personal reaction to those who never consider their own demise: “This negligence in a matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me more with irritation than pity; it astounds and appalls me; it seems quite monstrous to me.” • It doesn’t take a genius: “One needs no great sublimity of soul to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us with the inescapable and appalling alternative of being annihilated or wretched throughout eternity.” • “Let us put on as bold a face as we like: that is the end awaiting the world’s most illustrious life.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • What about the doubter? “The doubter who does not seek is at the same time very unhappy and very wrong. If in addition he feels a calm satisfaction, which he openly professes, and even regards as a reason for joy and vanity, I can find no terms to describe so extravagant a creature.” • Pascal’s questions about disbelief: 1. What gives rise to these feelings? 2. What reason for joy can be found in the expectation of nothing but helpless wretchedness? 3. What reason for vanity in being plunged into impenetrable darkness? 4. How can such an argument as this occur to a reasonable man?
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • From the heart of a doubter: 1. “I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I am terribly ignorant about everything.” 2. “I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects about everything and about itself, and does not know itself any better than it knows anything else.” 3. “I see terrifying spaces of the universe hemming me in, and I find myself attached to one corner of this vast expanse without knowing why I have been put in this place rather than that, or why the brief span of life allotted to me should be assigned to one moment rather than another of all the eternity which went before me and all that which will come after me.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • From the heart of a doubter (continued): 4. “Just as I do not know whence I come, so I do not know whither I am going.” 5. “All I know is that when I leave this world, I shall fall forever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God, but I do not know which of these two states is to be my eternal lot.” 6. I am full of “weakness and uncertainty.”
• What the doubter knows: “All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least about is this very death which I cannot evade.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • The doubter’s resolution: “My conclusion from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of seeking what is to happen to me. Perhaps I might find some enlightenment in my doubts, but I do not want to take the trouble, nor take a step to look for it: and afterwards, as I sneer at those who are striving to this end – (whatever certainty they have should arouse despair rather than vanity) – I will go without fear or foresight to face so momentous an event, and allow myself to be carried off limply to my death, uncertain of my future state for all eternity.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Indifference goes against human nature: “Nothing is so important to man as his state: nothing more fearful than eternity. Thus the fact that there exist men who are indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness is against nature.” • Man’s concern over temporal matters: “They fear the most trifling things, foresee and feel them; and the same man who spends so many days and nights in fury and despair at losing some office or at some imaginary affront to his honor is the very one who knows that he is going to lose everything through death but feels neither anxiety nor emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest. It is an incomprehensible spell…”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Sign of a weak mind: “There is no surer sign of extreme weakness of mind than the failure to recognize the unhappy state of a man without God; there is no surer sign of an evil heart than failure to desire that the eternal promises be true; nothing is more cowardly than to brazen (to face impudently or as with a face of brass) it out with God.” • Only two kinds of people: “Let them, in short, acknowledge that there are only two classes of persons who can be called reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Our obligation to the indifferent: “We must do for them what we would wish to be done for us in their place, and appeal to them to have pity on themselves, and to take at least a few steps in an attempt to find some light.” • Concluding thoughts: • No one can “annihilate eternity by keeping their minds off it.” • “The proofs lie before their eyes, but they refuse to look.” • “This is how men argue when they choose to live without knowing what they are and without seeking enlightenment. ‘I do not know,’ they say.”
An Analogy
“Perpetual indifference is like shutting off the alarm and going back to sleep when the house you are in, which you have built on the sand, is about to be washed away into the sea.” - Peter Kreeft
Encourage People To Seek • “Letter to induce men to seek God. Then make them look for him among the philosophers, sceptics and dogmatists, who will worry the man who seeks” (4/184). • “Order. A letter of exhortation to a friend, to induce him to seek. He will reply: ‘But what good will seeking do me? Nothing comes of it.’ Answer: ‘Do not despair.’ Then he in turn would say that he would be happy to find some light, but according to religion itself it would do him no good even if he did thus believe, and so he would just as soon not look. The answer to that is ‘the Machine’” (5/247). • “Order. After the letter urging men to seek God, write the letter about removing obstacles, that is the argument about the Machine, how to prepare it and how to use reason for the search” (11/246).
What People Seek • Happiness: “All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal. The reason why some go to war and some do not is the same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways. The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is the motive of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves” (148/428). “We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death” (401/437). • Diversion: People “have a secret instinct driving them to seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness” (136/139).
What People Seek • Rest: “All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement” (136/139). • Authority, Knowledge, & Pleasure: “Some seek their good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry and knowledge, some in pleasure” (148/428). • Cure for Miseries: “Men, it is in vain that you seek within yourselves the cure for your miseries. All your intelligence can only bring you to realize that it is not within yourselves that you will find either truth or good” (149/430).
What People Seek • Signs: “As far as choices go, you must take the trouble to seek the truth, for if you die without worshiping the true principle you are lost. ‘But,’ you say, ‘if he had wanted me to worship him, he would have left me some signs of his will.’ So he did, but you pay no heed. Look for them, then; it is well worth it” (158/236). • Concupiscence (desire for the things of the world): “There are some who see clearly that man has no other enemy but concupiscence, which turns him away from God, and not [human] enemies, no other good but God, and not a rich land. Let those who believe that man’s good lies in the flesh and his evil in whatever turns him away from sensual pleasures take their fill and die of it” (269/692).
What People Seek
• Satisfaction: “The ordinary life of men is like that of saints. They all seek satisfaction, and differ only according to the object in which they locate it.” (274/643).
A Way Forward • Search for the truth, even if you do not find it; this is more reasonable than persisting in indifference (Krailsheimer). • “There are only three sorts of people: those who have found God and serve him; those who are busy seeking him and have not found him; those who live without either seeking or finding him. The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy, those in the middle are unhappy and unreasonable” (160/257). • “There are only two classes of persons who can be called reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him” (427/194). Cf. Jeremiah 29:13-14.
A Way Forward • “This is what Scripture shows us when it says in so many places that those who seek God shall find him. This is not the light of which we speak as of the noonday sun. We do not say that those who seek the sun at noon or water in the sea will find it, and so it necessarily follows that the evidence of God in nature is not of this kind” (781/242). • “God is hidden. But he lets those who seek find him” (Additional Pensées, #14). • “But seek first His kingdom, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you” (Mt. 6:33).
The Bottom Line
“There is something to be said for every error, but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.” - G.K. Chesterton
Closed Circuit “It is quite possible to have such a closed circuit of unsound presuppositions that wider reality is finally ignored and all experience must be pressed through this constricting circle of premises. Henrik Ibsen expressed this in his play, The Wild Duck: ‘Take away the life lie from the average man and you take away his happiness.’” - Os Guinness
Henrik Ibsen
Norwegian Playwright 1828-1906
What Few Admit “Man inhabits, for his own convenience, a homemade universe within the greater alien world of external matter and his own irrationality. Out of the illimitable blackness of that world the light of his customary thinking scoops, as it were, a little illuminated cave – a tunnel of brightness, in which, from the birth of consciousness to its death, he lives, moves, and has his being….We ignore the outer darkness; or if we cannot ignore it, if it presses too insistently upon us, we disapprove of being afraid.” Aldous Huxley 1894 - 1963
Untried Christianity
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
G.K. Chesterton 1874-1936
Introduction In his award-winning book, The Moviegoer (1961), Walker Percy presents Binx Bolling as a 30-year-old who embarks on a quest – “a harebrained search for authenticity.” When asked about the nature of the search, he responds, “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” Does this fully explain why so many refuse to engage in the search? Why so much indifference to the search?
Walker Percy 1916-1990
Pascal’s Pensée (163/200) “A man in a dungeon, not knowing whether sentence has been passed on him, with only an hour left to find out, and that hour enough, once he knows it has been passed, to have it revoked. It would be unnatural for him to spend that hour not finding out whether sentence has been passed but playing piquet (card game).”
The Meaning of Indifference • Indifference, n., “absence of feeling for or against, hence, especially, absence of care for or about a person or thing; want of zeal, interest, concern, or attention; unconcern, apathy” (OED). • Jesus said to Peter, James, and John, “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me” (Mt. 26:38). He found them sleeping three times (vss. 40,43,45). • Pascal’s Reflection: “Jesus seeks some comfort at least from his three dearest friends, and they sleep; he asks them to bear with him a while, and they abandon him with complete indifference, and with so little pity that it did not keep them awake even for a single moment.”
Indifference in Jane Eyre “With this announcement he [Mr. Rochester] rose from his chair, and stood, leaning on the marble mantelpiece: in that attitude his shape was seen plainly as well as his face; his unusual breadth of chest, disproportionate almost to his length of limb. I am sure most people would have thought him an ugly man; yet there was so much unconscious pride in his port; so much ease in his demeanor; such a look of complete indifference to his own external appearance; so haughty a reliance on the power of other qualities, intrinsic or adventitious, to atone for the lack of mere personal attractiveness, that, in looking at him, one inevitably shared the indifference, and, even in a blind, imperfect sense, put faith in the confidence.”
Observation of Colson At His Watergate Trial
Chuck Colson 1931-2012
“Years of listening to sordid tales of theft, murder and rape desensitizes the dark-suited bailiffs and clerks, who have learned to discipline themselves to conscious indifference. Like mechanical men oblivious to emotion of the human world about them, they move about the court, passing papers, transcribing, escorting witnesses.”
Who Is Pascal Addressing in His Pensées? In his Pensées, Pascal is not addressing “the honest doubter…but nor is it the hardened sinner; by worldly standards the cultured devotee of self-interest, ruled by pride, may be offending neither the law of the land nor even social convention. Much of Pascal’s initial argument is, however, designed to make him see that he is harming himself, let alone breaking the law of God whose existence is yet to be proved. The so-called libertines were motivated not so much by hostility as by indifference with regard to religion, and only by piercing their carapace (the hard body-shell of tortoises) of complacency can Pascal touch the vital organ, the heart.” - A.J. Krailsheimer
“The Carapace of Complacency”
Pascal’s question: How can I pierce the carapace of complacency and touch the vital organ, the heart?
• “Never before has skepticism had such a brilliant halo around its head. There is a glory about ‘not knowing’” (Ravi Zacharias). • “Skepticism says that nothing can be known with complete certainty, and that the only sensible thing is neither to affirm nor deny anything” (John Blanchard). • “You are unwilling to come to Me, that you may have life” (Jesus; Jn. 5:40).
Skepticism Is Self-Contradictory “They all amount to saying that it is true that there is no truth, or we can know that we cannot know, or we can be certain that we cannot be certain, or it is a universal truth that there are no universal truths, or you can be quite dogmatic about the fact that you can’t be dogmatic, or it is an absolute that there are no absolutes, or it is an objective truth that there is no objective truth.” Dr. Peter Kreeft
Philosophy Professor, Boston College 1937 -
- Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Before one attacks and criticizes Christianity, at least know what it is. Pascal: “Let them at least learn what this religion is which they are attacking before attacking it.” • Christianity’s Claim: It has “a clear sight of God and plain and manifest evidence of his existence.” Effective Objection: “There is nothing to be seen in the world which proves him so obviously.” • God is Deus absconditus, the hidden God. This means: (1) “God has appointed visible signs in the Church so that he shall be recognized by those who genuinely seek him;” and (2) God “has none the less hidden them in such a way that he will only be perceived by those who seek him with all their heart.”
Proving God’s Existence • “It is very difficult to produce arguments at the popular level for the existence of God. And many of the most popular arguments seem to me invalid” (C.S. Lewis). • “God’s existence not only cannot be proved, it should not be attempted. God is not the final point of a ten-point proof but the one on whom all meaning rests” (Os Guinness). • “God’s existence can neither be conclusively proved nor disapproved” (Alister McGrath). • “In the final analysis there either is a God or Gods or there are none. There either is something or someone ultimate apart from me or there is not” (R.C. Sproul).
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • If they are not concerned about seeking the truth, why do they protest that God doesn’t show himself to them? • If they are really going to attack Christianity, “they would have to protest that they made every effort to seek it everywhere.” Even if they didn’t find the truth as the Church teaches it, in order to be intellectually honest, they would have to investigate there also. • Pascal knows how people behave regarding the truth. “They think they have made great efforts to learn when they have spent a few hours reading some book of the Bible, and have questioned some ecclesiastic (pastor, priest, minister) about the truths of the faith.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Even when they boast that they have sought the truth by reading books and talking with others, Pascal answers, “such negligence is intolerable.” • Why this indifference??? “The immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us, affecting us so deeply, that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter.” • Pascal’s distinction: “I make an absolute distinction between those who strive with all their might to learn and those who live without troubling themselves or thinking about it.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • What about those who sincerely doubt? “I can feel nothing but compassion for those who sincerely lament their doubt, who regard it as the ultimate misfortune, and who, sparing no effort to escape from it, make their search their principle and most serious business.” • What about those who never think about death? “As for those who spend their lives without a thought for this final end of life and who, solely because they do not find within themselves the light of conviction, neglect to look elsewhere, and to examine thoroughly whether this opinion is one of those which people accept out of credulous simplicity or one of those which, though obscure in themselves, none the less have a most solid and unshakeable foundation: as for them, I view them very differently.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Pascal’s personal reaction to those who never consider their own demise: “This negligence in a matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me more with irritation than pity; it astounds and appalls me; it seems quite monstrous to me.” • It doesn’t take a genius: “One needs no great sublimity of soul to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us with the inescapable and appalling alternative of being annihilated or wretched throughout eternity.” • “Let us put on as bold a face as we like: that is the end awaiting the world’s most illustrious life.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • What about the doubter? “The doubter who does not seek is at the same time very unhappy and very wrong. If in addition he feels a calm satisfaction, which he openly professes, and even regards as a reason for joy and vanity, I can find no terms to describe so extravagant a creature.” • Pascal’s questions about disbelief: 1. What gives rise to these feelings? 2. What reason for joy can be found in the expectation of nothing but helpless wretchedness? 3. What reason for vanity in being plunged into impenetrable darkness? 4. How can such an argument as this occur to a reasonable man?
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • From the heart of a doubter: 1. “I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I am terribly ignorant about everything.” 2. “I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects about everything and about itself, and does not know itself any better than it knows anything else.” 3. “I see terrifying spaces of the universe hemming me in, and I find myself attached to one corner of this vast expanse without knowing why I have been put in this place rather than that, or why the brief span of life allotted to me should be assigned to one moment rather than another of all the eternity which went before me and all that which will come after me.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • From the heart of a doubter (continued): 4. “Just as I do not know whence I come, so I do not know whither I am going.” 5. “All I know is that when I leave this world, I shall fall forever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God, but I do not know which of these two states is to be my eternal lot.” 6. I am full of “weakness and uncertainty.”
• What the doubter knows: “All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least about is this very death which I cannot evade.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • The doubter’s resolution: “My conclusion from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of seeking what is to happen to me. Perhaps I might find some enlightenment in my doubts, but I do not want to take the trouble, nor take a step to look for it: and afterwards, as I sneer at those who are striving to this end – (whatever certainty they have should arouse despair rather than vanity) – I will go without fear or foresight to face so momentous an event, and allow myself to be carried off limply to my death, uncertain of my future state for all eternity.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Indifference goes against human nature: “Nothing is so important to man as his state: nothing more fearful than eternity. Thus the fact that there exist men who are indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness is against nature.” • Man’s concern over temporal matters: “They fear the most trifling things, foresee and feel them; and the same man who spends so many days and nights in fury and despair at losing some office or at some imaginary affront to his honor is the very one who knows that he is going to lose everything through death but feels neither anxiety nor emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest. It is an incomprehensible spell…”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Sign of a weak mind: “There is no surer sign of extreme weakness of mind than the failure to recognize the unhappy state of a man without God; there is no surer sign of an evil heart than failure to desire that the eternal promises be true; nothing is more cowardly than to brazen (to face impudently or as with a face of brass) it out with God.” • Only two kinds of people: “Let them, in short, acknowledge that there are only two classes of persons who can be called reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.”
Pascal’s Argument: Against Indifference • Our obligation to the indifferent: “We must do for them what we would wish to be done for us in their place, and appeal to them to have pity on themselves, and to take at least a few steps in an attempt to find some light.” • Concluding thoughts: • No one can “annihilate eternity by keeping their minds off it.” • “The proofs lie before their eyes, but they refuse to look.” • “This is how men argue when they choose to live without knowing what they are and without seeking enlightenment. ‘I do not know,’ they say.”
An Analogy
“Perpetual indifference is like shutting off the alarm and going back to sleep when the house you are in, which you have built on the sand, is about to be washed away into the sea.” - Peter Kreeft
Encourage People To Seek • “Letter to induce men to seek God. Then make them look for him among the philosophers, sceptics and dogmatists, who will worry the man who seeks” (4/184). • “Order. A letter of exhortation to a friend, to induce him to seek. He will reply: ‘But what good will seeking do me? Nothing comes of it.’ Answer: ‘Do not despair.’ Then he in turn would say that he would be happy to find some light, but according to religion itself it would do him no good even if he did thus believe, and so he would just as soon not look. The answer to that is ‘the Machine’” (5/247). • “Order. After the letter urging men to seek God, write the letter about removing obstacles, that is the argument about the Machine, how to prepare it and how to use reason for the search” (11/246).
What People Seek • Happiness: “All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal. The reason why some go to war and some do not is the same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways. The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is the motive of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves” (148/428). “We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death” (401/437). • Diversion: People “have a secret instinct driving them to seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness” (136/139).
What People Seek • Rest: “All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement” (136/139). • Authority, Knowledge, & Pleasure: “Some seek their good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry and knowledge, some in pleasure” (148/428). • Cure for Miseries: “Men, it is in vain that you seek within yourselves the cure for your miseries. All your intelligence can only bring you to realize that it is not within yourselves that you will find either truth or good” (149/430).
What People Seek • Signs: “As far as choices go, you must take the trouble to seek the truth, for if you die without worshiping the true principle you are lost. ‘But,’ you say, ‘if he had wanted me to worship him, he would have left me some signs of his will.’ So he did, but you pay no heed. Look for them, then; it is well worth it” (158/236). • Concupiscence (desire for the things of the world): “There are some who see clearly that man has no other enemy but concupiscence, which turns him away from God, and not [human] enemies, no other good but God, and not a rich land. Let those who believe that man’s good lies in the flesh and his evil in whatever turns him away from sensual pleasures take their fill and die of it” (269/692).
What People Seek
• Satisfaction: “The ordinary life of men is like that of saints. They all seek satisfaction, and differ only according to the object in which they locate it.” (274/643).
A Way Forward • Search for the truth, even if you do not find it; this is more reasonable than persisting in indifference (Krailsheimer). • “There are only three sorts of people: those who have found God and serve him; those who are busy seeking him and have not found him; those who live without either seeking or finding him. The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy, those in the middle are unhappy and unreasonable” (160/257). • “There are only two classes of persons who can be called reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him” (427/194). Cf. Jeremiah 29:13-14.
A Way Forward • “This is what Scripture shows us when it says in so many places that those who seek God shall find him. This is not the light of which we speak as of the noonday sun. We do not say that those who seek the sun at noon or water in the sea will find it, and so it necessarily follows that the evidence of God in nature is not of this kind” (781/242). • “God is hidden. But he lets those who seek find him” (Additional Pensées, #14). • “But seek first His kingdom, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you” (Mt. 6:33).
The Bottom Line
“There is something to be said for every error, but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.” - G.K. Chesterton
Closed Circuit “It is quite possible to have such a closed circuit of unsound presuppositions that wider reality is finally ignored and all experience must be pressed through this constricting circle of premises. Henrik Ibsen expressed this in his play, The Wild Duck: ‘Take away the life lie from the average man and you take away his happiness.’” - Os Guinness
Henrik Ibsen
Norwegian Playwright 1828-1906
What Few Admit “Man inhabits, for his own convenience, a homemade universe within the greater alien world of external matter and his own irrationality. Out of the illimitable blackness of that world the light of his customary thinking scoops, as it were, a little illuminated cave – a tunnel of brightness, in which, from the birth of consciousness to its death, he lives, moves, and has his being….We ignore the outer darkness; or if we cannot ignore it, if it presses too insistently upon us, we disapprove of being afraid.” Aldous Huxley 1894 - 1963
Untried Christianity
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
G.K. Chesterton 1874-1936
