Pierre Manent’s Challenge to Modern Atheism
In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom recounts hearing a Parisian waiter call his fellow waiter a “Cartesian.” “It was not pretentiousness; he was just referring to what was for him a type. … Descartes and Pascal represent a choice between reason and revelation, science and piety, the choice from which everything else follows.” Thirty-nine years after Closing was published, Pierre Manent, himself a great translator of Bloom, offers in his latest book an erudite yet charming reminder to his fellow countrymen to reread Pascal, since the key to their riddle may be found there. While correcting many scholarly misreadings, Manent never gets bogged down in footnotes, focusing frankly on the great urgency he sees in Pascal’s message not just for the French but for all the heirs of the modern West: it is not that we have successfully dismissed the call of God; it is that we have distracted ourselves, and in the process debased and subjected ourselves.
Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference is not directly a polemic about the present; it is a series of close readings of major themes in Pascal: the Wager, his “proofs” of God’s existence, his understanding of the relationship of the Old and New Testaments, his diagnosis of self-love in relation to his predecessor Montaigne and his successor Rousseau, and perhaps thorniest of all, his treatment of the mystery of predestination. Each of these treatments is theologically profound, on Manent’s part as on Pascal’s. Manent explicates the Wager as more akin to St. Anselm’s ontological argument—designed to make us aware of the dependence of our own intellect—than to Aquinas’s reasoning from effects to causes. The Wager hammers home the reality of our situation: the depth of our misery if faced honestly, and the vastness of the promise of eternal life with God if taken seriously. “Pascal intends to affirm simultaneously two strictly opposed things: the choice of the Infinite imposes itself on us in a way that overturns the ordinary conditions of human choices; and the choice of the Infinite ought to be as easy and natural as our most ordinary choices.” The possibility of “the God-who-is-the-friend-of human-beings” is both inconceivable to merely human reasoning, and it answers the deepest needs of a being who possesses not just an intellect but a will.
Pascal has suffered many labels ever since his own time: sometimes dismissed as a fideist, sometimes claimed as a forerunner of existentialism, sometimes maligned for his “sad religion,” as Leszek Kolakowski put it. But by reading well beyond the Pensées to Pascal’s whole corpus, Manent is determined to make sense of the “joy” Pascal reported in the Memorial, the fragment he carried in his coat pocket for the last five years of his life. The first lines are well known:
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,
Not of philosophers and scholars.
Certainty, certainty, sentiment, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
These lines invite a fideistic reading: here is the great mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal, reduced to mystical effusions at what he takes to be contact with the divine! But the Memorial goes on: “Deum meum et Deum vestrum. Thy God will be my God.” Manent expounds the riches of these two echoes of Scripture. The first is Christ charging Mary Magdelene to tell his disciples of the Resurrection; the second is Ruth’s oath to Naomi to leave the land of her fathers and become an Israelite (and, eventually, to become an ancestor of the Savior). These references, Manent writes, “define not only who God is but how God unites human beings and human beings unite with God. … Pascal brings to light the unbreakable continuity between a carnal movement that is also spiritual and a spiritual movement that is also carnal.” Thus an anti-Marcionite insistence on the integrity of God’s revelations in human history, in Israel and in the Church, even if the Hebrew Bible cannot fully make sense on its own terms without Christ, is essential to Pascal’s entire apologia.
Here we can begin to understand why Manent, a political philosopher, set out to write on the apparently antipolitical Pascal. Manent’s oeuvre includes several treatments of single authors—such as Tocqueville and Montaigne —as well as sweeping genealogical studies of political thinking in the West from Athens to Brussels. Manent has long been interested in the early-modern period as the time that decisively revealed what we have to hope and fear from modernity, and especially in what he calls the “gap”: the disjuncture between the heights of moral duty as proclaimed by both classical philosophy and Christianity and the everyday human experience of habitual vice and moral frailty. I Machiavelli drove his vindication of the “effectual truth” into this “gap,” teaching us that nobility never gets results
Manent’s consistent concern in his practical writings on politics has been to convince us moderns , against the Cartesian prophets of progress, that we retain moral responsibility for self-government. Against the despairing ideologies that reacted against progressivism, Manent has also insisted on the continued capacity for human beings to deliberate about the good and pursue noble deeds together. Therefore his A World Beyond Politics and Democracy Without Nations? have defended the nation-state as perhaps the only humane political form that mediates between universal ideals and particular loyalties.
In recent years, Manent has moved toward explicitly theological territory, invoking Aquinas’s account of practical reason in Natural Law and Human Rights to explain why abstract rights claims are so fatal for political judgment, and then directly critiquing the two rival religions in France: The Religion of Humanity argues that Comte triumphed where Marx and Nietzsche failed—in creating a post-Christian Europe. But this Comtean creed substitutes generic pain-alleviating sympathy for the martyrial daring of charity that seeks the whole good of the other in both body and soul. Beyond Radical Secularism warns that post-Christian European elites are ill equipped to address the Islamic claim of the binding authority of God’s law on all things. But studying Pascal seems to depart from Manent’s prior Thomistic confidence in the congruence of nature and grace.
What, then, is Pascal’s political insight? Manent insists that the state today, understood apart from God, is “conceived and willed to be unlimited.” This fact is demonstrated by how “the legislatures of Europe … overturned the rules of human filiation” and “erased the most universal reference points of human experience” with “insouciance”—not just in the creation of same-sex marriage but in the legal enshrinement of surrogacy and artificial insemination too. (The French debate over these matters focused much more consistently on filiation than the American one.)
The consequence has not been greater subtlety in our political deliberations, Manent avers: “We have made ourselves incapable of seriously raising the highest, the most urgent, question that the rational animal can pose.” Echoing T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, he asks, “How, then, shall we bring into view the Object that we have rejected, or let escape from our attention? How shall we reprise the Question? The proposition (the French word proposition includes both the sense of a concept believed and a proposal made) that God offers man both limits and elevates politics. The “order of the flesh,” with its pretensions to grandeur, is much less great than the “order of the mind,” the beauty of pure knowledge. But the third order, represented by Christ and his saints, the “order of the will,” is infinitely more splendid. Pascal perceives this holy grandeur in the sobriety of the Gospels’ narration. “To have himself recognized in the truth of his being, Jesus Christ had to make himself unrecognizable.” But although concupiscence defines the human order, that order retains value; the contest of wills and selves, inevitable in politics, means that good intentions or even sanctity do not substitute for good judgment.
Pascal rebuked the Frondist noble rebles of his day and enjoined loyalty to the boy King Louis XIV on the grounds that “justice without force is contested, because there are always wicked men. Force without justice is accused. One must therefore put justice and force together, and for that, make it that what is just be strong or what is strong be just.” Manent comments: “Force … has this decisive advantage for the human order: that it is visible and objective and that it is a principle of unity and reunion since it ‘puts everyone in accord.’” This frankness about the role of force in human life allows Pascalian Christianity to escape the humanitarianism that would make compassion the highest good and suffering the worst evil. In one of the most moving passages of the book, Manent reflects:
The Christian loves his neighbor as himself by regarding him as he regards himself, a member, like him, of Adam, a member, like him, of Christ. … [But c]ompassion cannot ‘put itself in the place’ of the one who, far from suffering, causes suffering. How to love someone who is hateful?
Thus, Pascal foresees the paradox that the tolerant liberal so quickly becomes cruel to the intolerant.
Manent devotes three of ten chapters to Pascal’s diagnosis of the indelibly corrupt moi, the selfish self. Pascal treats the Stoic Epictetus as the greatest ancient philosopher and rebukes him for intellectual pride manifested in lacking the fear of death. And he puts forward his countryman Montaigne as the greatest proponent of self-love. Only Christianity, with its shocking dogma of original sin, a scandal to both classical and modern philosophy’s pretensions to independence, “reveals to human beings, at the same time as a slavery until then unknown, a Liberator until then inconceivable.” Manent then invokes Rousseau, who would rework Pascal’s categories to attempt to distinguish the morally neutral love of self from the reflexive, socially elicited self-love. But Pascal anticipates the objection: there is no such thing as autonomy for such beings as we are. Pascal names the human being as not an individual but a “‘member,’ who seeks in uncertainty, who is bewildered and who wanders: each human being, so to speak, seeks a body, the body of which it would be a member and in which it can find the life and being that fulfill it.” That being the case, we cannot know ourselves without knowing and loving our Creator. By linking Montaigne, Pascal, and Rousseau, this analysis recalls Benjamin and Jenna Storey’s recent Why We Are Restless. But whereas the Storeys focus on liberal education as an antidote to human misery, Manent follows Pascal in insisting on the need for conversion.
Pascal has gone almost four centuries without canonization, but other great Catholic souls have slept longer before being raised to the altars. The late Pope Francis honored Pascal in the Apostolic Letter Sublimitas et Miseria Hominis. To the best of my knowledge, a group of Pascal devotees continues to meet every Tuesday evening to pray for his canonization at the church of Saint-Étienne du Mont. Manent has offered this book to the world at an axial time in the religious history of his country: even as a chauvinistic Islam asserts itself in the public square and Pentecostalism attracts many immigrant populations, a quiet revival of French Catholicism is underway, especially among young people drawn to the rigor and austerity of traditional spiritual practices. Many now refer to Lent as “the Christian Ramadan.” Msgr. Rougé, Bishop of Nanterre, has described this change as a shift from the old “confession by culture” (90 percent of Frenchmen were baptized Catholics only two generations ago) to a “confession by choice,” in which faith is the fruit of a hard-won personal quest. Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference will introduce many to a great guide for that quest.
But to work out the philosophical and political implications of a recovered faith, France will also need Aquinas and Aristotle. Pascal’s theology is sublime, beautiful, and all-consuming. But it reflects the life of a celibate mystic rather than that of the statesman who must transmit Christian culture. Statesmen after all must wager.