This year’s Thanksgiving Day, November 23, was not only our national day of remembrance, but also a significant religious anniversary: 369 years to the day since Blaise Pascal’s “Night of Fire.” This mystical and deeply private experience transformed the great French mathematician into one of the greatest Christian thinkers of modernity. Although we rarely think of these personal experiences as historical events, this one is worth remembering. This produced not only a change in Pascal’s life, but also a new understanding of Christianity, specially designed to speak to modern souls.
According to Pascal count of that night, for two hours, after a day spent in prayer, he had a revelation. He wrote what happened under the title FIRE – like the fire that fell on Moses on Mount Horeb. This fire made him know the God “of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” – the patriarchs of Israel – “and not of philosophers and scholars”.
This experience turned Pascal’s life upside down. He turned his attention away from his groundbreaking scientific studies to devote himself to writing his Provincial letters And Thoughts, in which he would reconceive for the modern world what Pierre Manent calls “the Christian proposition”: “the whole set of Christian dogmas or mysteries” that God in his Church offers “for the consideration of our understanding and the assent of our commitment “. The Night of the Fire was so important to Pascal that he kept notes about it on a piece of paper sewn into his jacket pocket. For the remaining seven years of his all-too-brief life, he unstitched the pocket and sewed the bills back onto his new garment every time he put on a new vest.
This event is particularly important to remember in our time, when some Christians are questioning modernity, liberalism and the ecumenical bonds that have been forged between believers of several faiths in recent decades. Remembering Pascal’s “Night of Fire” can help us understand once again, in religious terms, the importance of one of these bonds: the reconciliation that the Catholic Church has sought with the Jews since the Holocaust. Pascal’s conversion experience, with its distinctly Mosaic overtones, would ultimately lead him to show that the strongest foundation of Christianity is the sanctity of Judaism, past and present.
That night, he reoriented Pascal’s life by convincing his philosophically sophisticated and mathematically demanding mind to take seriously the scriptural revelation of a personal God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the god by René Descartes. This turning point made Pascal realize that the flesh and blood story of human beings and the God who calls them by name is at the heart of biblical revelation, and prepared him to develop a distinct appreciation of the descendants of flesh and blood of the patriarchs.
For Pascal, a great sign of the holiness of Christianity is that it has another holy religion for its foundation. The uniqueness and antiquity of Judaism among the world’s religions, its distinctive testimony to the strange and fraught relationship between God and his people, and Israel’s continuing testimony to a common heritage of prophecy between Jews and Christians, even s ‘they do not agree on its meaning, has become for Pascal the sine qua non of Christian belief and understanding.
In a section of the Thoughts who considers the “advantages of the Jews”, Pascal notes that the Jews present themselves from the beginning of history as an extraordinary people. While most nations comprise an “infinite collection of families,” Israel is composed solely “of brothers,” descendants of their common father, Abraham. Unlike many once-great nations that have disappeared beneath the sands of history, this one has survived for millennia despite repeated efforts to destroy it. This most ancient people is called in the Bible to be “the light of the nations”. Perhaps Pascal wants to suggest that the brotherhood of the Jewish people contains a lesson of our common human brotherhood applicable to all the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.
Second, Pascal notes, these people have the oldest law the world knows—a law that the great ancient Judeo-Greek authors Philo and Josephus maintained had been observed for a thousand years before even the word “law » appears among the Greeks. This law is so exceptionally perfect that other legislators borrowed it whenever they discovered it, as Josephus seeks to show. Human thought generally progresses through questioning and reformulation; It is therefore remarkable, Pascal maintains, that the oldest law is so excellent that anyone who encounters it feels obliged to respect and imitate it. This can be seen in America, from the legal codes of the Puritans to the invocations of Moses and the 10 Commandments in the architecture of the Supreme Court.
Third, the severity of the details of the law makes its longevity among the Jewish people even more astonishing. The law imposes on its followers “a thousand particular and painful observances”, writes Pascal, from circumcision to dietary restrictions. Yet while the more lenient laws of other states were often modified, the “rebellious and impatient” Jewish people endured this demanding yoke for centuries.
Fourth, the books that Jews keep tell the story of Israel’s internal strife, its injustices, and its unfaithfulness to God. As Pascal says, the Jews “bear with love and devotion this book in which Moses declares that they have been ungrateful to God all their lives.” In other words, the Torah does not whitewash. The testimony of a people so willing to accuse themselves is, Pascal implies, particularly trustworthy.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Jews consistently testify that human beings abandoned “direct and constant communication with God” thousands of years ago and have lived in a “constant and direct communication with God” ever since. distance” from the divine. Their experience shows that the alienation experienced by human beings in modernity is far from new. Although imperfect systems like capitalism or limited intellectual frameworks like modernity may warrant criticism, the alienation so common among us has much deeper roots. It is in fact at the heart of the oldest description of the human condition: since the expulsion from Eden, human beings have felt like “fallen kings”, as Pascal writes. Awareness of the gap between the perfect holiness and happiness we long for and the flimsy substitutes we concoct is the necessary condition for seeking our own redemption.
Certainly, if Pascal expresses a respect for the Jews which stands out among Christian authors, he believes that the Messiah whom the Jews did not recognize, Jesus Christ, shows the way to salvation. The Jewish refusal to recognize this is, sometimes for Pascal, all the more reason for Christians to cherish their testimony – because the testimony of witnesses who do not share our conclusions but nevertheless affirm our premises is the most credible type of testimony. The Jewish prophets of the Old Testament are, for Pascal, the greatest proofs of the New Testament.
Sometimes, however, Pascal slips into facile supersessionism, arguing that the prophets point to a new covenant with Christ, meant to entirely replace the old covenant of Moses. As theologian Paul Griffiths points out in his recent book Why read Pascal?here Pascal is guilty of forgetting his own argument that the Jewish people “continue to exist for a reason,” and that their continued presence is part of a divine plan.
The Catholic Church has affirmed the continuing validity of Jewish elections in recent decades. His 1965 statement on relations between the Church and non-Christian religions, Nostra Aetate, notes that, in Romans 11, 28-29, the Apostle Paul teaches that “the Jews remain very dear to God, because of the patriarchs, since God does not take back the gifts he has granted nor the choice he did. As Griffiths argues, “Catholic doctrine now requires that it be said that the covenant between the Lord and Israel remains in force, and will be in force until the end of all things.” This implies, among other things, that the halakhic life of practicing Jews is always a means of responding to the special gift that the Lord has given and continues to give to Israel.
How can this happen if the Jesus whom the Jews reject as the Messiah they were promised is who he claims to be: neither a liar nor a fool, but Lord? Here, Pascal reminds us that grace (even probably the grace of Christian revelation) is not “the final end” but “only a figure of glory”, which, when it finally appears in its fullness, will show how Seemingly irreconcilable contradictions intertwine in a multicolored but seamless garment of truth. We do not yet see this glory, nor how it could reconcile the ancient conflict between Christians and Jews. But belief in the God of the Old Testament, who does not revoke His promises to the children of Abraham, and in the God of the New Testament, who brings this promise to the Gentiles, encourages Catholics to believe that such reconciliation will come about. . .
Other seemingly insurmountable historical divisions have already been overcome. Earlier this year, Pope Francis wrote a letter: “Of the greatness and misery of man», to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Pascal’s birth. This is notable because Francis is the Church’s first Jesuit pope, and Pascal was the most incisive critic of the Jesuits of his time. No one familiar with the bitterness and violence of the Jesuit-Jansenist feuds in which Pascal’s life was embroiled would have imagined that a Jesuit pope would become Pascal’s champion. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
At a time when Jews particularly need the solidarity of Christians, it is appropriate to remember that the respect of Christians towards the Jewish people is not primarily a consequence of liberal tolerance, but an implication of the Christian faith. herself. Christianity requires belief in many paradoxical things, and one of the richest of these paradoxes is that two covenants, old and new, must coexist if what Christians believe about God keeping his promises is true. Perhaps this is what Pascal began to understand during his “Night of Fire,” when he received his faith in Jesus Christ from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
