Recently in my humanities class at Thales College, we read selections from Pascal’s Pensées, including that famous and mysterious assertion of his that the heart has its reasons whereof the head knows not. I explained to the students that by “heart” — French coeur, as it were the core and center of your being — Pascal did not imply anything like a romantic feeling. It was similar, I suggested, to what the schoolmen meant by intellectus, the immediate apprehension of a truth. That is what you have when you recognize, without rational proof, that the whole is greater than a part, or that you do indeed exist. They are the axioms of knowledge. 

C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, will call the axioms of moral action “the Tao” and will say that they are not the results of moral reasoning but rather are the principles, to be grasped or seen without the mediation of argument. If, for example, somebody asks us why we should honor our parents, we might adduce some reasons to help him understand, such as that our parents have cared for us when we could not care for ourselves, and, therefore, we ought to be grateful to them; but really it is something that any healthy person must see, without arguments. Anyone who denies it is either lying or corrupt, or he is like a color-blind person who insists that there is no such thing as green.

How is such a vision like faith, and what does it imply for how we are to live?

Pascal does accept the rational force of arguments that prove that God must exist, but he says they are of no force for the person. We agree with them, and in a moment we doubt. They are reasons of the head, rational deductions from self-evident premises. The trouble is that God is, for Pascal, as he wrote in his famous Memorial, “not the God of the philosophers,” but the epitome of personhood, the “God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” That God, the only God, is not to be reached by reason. For nothing proves that a person must act thus or so; and man longs for God, not for the answer to a theological theorem. Otherwise he walks on a precipice, with an abyss on each side, the darkness from which he came, and the darkness into which he is going.

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Man, wretched as he is, turning from one distraction to another to keep away the ennui, the awareness of his insignificance — man, noble as he is, the “thinking reed,” as Pascal calls him, who in a thought that occupies neither space nor time can embrace the whole universe of space and time — man, by his own power, cannot span either abyss. He needs God to come to him to raise him up. God reveals himself to those who earnestly search for him; he is “a hidden God,” who calls and would be sought. The appeal is from the infinite and divine Person to the person who is his creature. It is an appeal to man’s heart, the center of his being, from the fiery heart of all life and all existence.

Therefore does God reveal himself to man and reveals man to himself; not wholly but in part, not yet clearly, not yet face to face. This revelation is, in the strict sense of the word, the content of faith. Now, it will not do to insist that God cannot enlighten the mind of man with such truths. Pascal has no respect for a deist supreme being unable to do what any mere child can do: to speak. An atheist earnestly seeking God is, for Pascal, worthy of honor, but not the deist who no longer seeks God because he has reduced him to irrelevance.

Art by Bill Wilson

Granting, then, that divine revelation is possible, the content of faith is no mere finite set of affirmations. It is a light: and then we may say, with the Psalmist, that it is in the light of God that we see light. Those who find the faith find more than the answers to a few questions. They find light. They are like people wandering in a dark wilderness who have been brought, not by their own power but also not in violation of it, to the summit of a high mountain, whence they see more than this or that but an entire vista; they see the mutual relations of hill and valley, brook and river, town and countryside. I know by painful experience that mankind is not perfectible because I am not perfectible, but the account of man’s fall in Genesis, an account both unfathomable and endlessly illuminative, shows me what I could hardly have learned on my own: for example, that I am compromised in both mind and body, in my appetite for knowledge and in my appetites for food and sex, and that I, therefore, must hide myself from God, from others, and from myself: “I hid myself, because I was naked.” I know I am unjust, and I cannot stand upright before God or man, but I am apt to forget this, and to play dress-up in righteousness, to dim my eyes or to distract them with the flash and glare of worldly honor. Yet what worldly honor, what Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius can stand against the piercing light and darkness of Calvary? And when the overestimation of man’s unaided powers proves an illusion, as optimism is ever one false step from yawning despair, what mere materialist can shed such light on us as to summon us back to our glory? The materialist reduces man to beast, and beast to vegetation, and vegetation to inanimate stuff, meaningless, world without end. But the same faith that sheds light on our wretchedness sheds light on our glory: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” says God, and “you have made him little less than the angels,” says the Psalmist, and “he shall abide in me and I in him,” says Jesus.

Now, then, if a thing is true, and if its truth is revealed by faith, so that the eyes of the heart are opened, it is sheer mulishness to insist that we must not act upon that truth until everyone sees it, or to ignore or deny that truth because we do not approve of the way it has come to us. We are told quite clearly that not all people will see: we are told that the heart may be hard and the eyes blind. What then? If they say to us, “Produce your reasons,” meaning the reasons of the head, “and we will assent,” how will that do? All the reasons in the world, valid as they may be for the head, will not move the person one inch, unless the heart assents with its whole and immediate grasp of the rightness and the beauty and the power of the truth. We must then make an appeal to the heart, the core. A life flooded with the light of faith is a beautiful thing, and some will see it — some; not all. The same is true of a culture or a nation.

America, open your eyes again.

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