Pascal and the Last Act
A brief reflection on death and naturalism, featuring Blaise Pascal, St. Francis De Sales, and Philip Rieff
The other evening, my wife Ann and I were reading before bed. She was perusing a book on diet and pregnancy, while I was slowly making my way through Pascal’s Pensées. I’d already read the Pensées some ten years ago now, but I’d been inspired to pick him back up after reading what Walker Percy wrote about those who influenced him:
“Actually I do not consider myself a novelist but a moralist or a propagandist. My spiritual father is Pascal (and/or Kierkegaard). And if I also kneel before the altar of Lawrence and Joyce and Flaubert, it is not because I wish to do what they did, even if I could. What I really want to do is to tell people what they must do and what they must believe if they want to live.” (This quote comes from Tolson’s biography on Percy)
If Pascal was so important to Percy, I wanted (and still want) to know why.
Anyway, I turned to Ann and said, “Listen to this.” I read Pensée 165 to her, where Pascal writes, “The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”
Considered on a purely natural level, no matter how good life gets, no matter how well you play your role in the drama of life, it will always and inevitably end with your getting separated from everything you’ve known and loved here on earth: your friends, family, goods of fortune, and so on. No matter how much weight you’ve lost, how much money you’ve saved, how many obstacles you’ve overcome, there it is: A headstone with your name on it.
It is perhaps impolite to bring this uncomfortable fact up in the company of strangers or those whom you meet for the first time. But in the context of Anna casually reading about what to eat while pregnant, in a nice comfortable home just before bed, with warmly lit walls, and with peace and quiet pervading the room, it was at this serene time, when death seemed furthest away, that I couldn’t help but read Pascal and laugh.
Pascal’s quote above hearkens to what St. Francis De Sales has to say on the subject of your own death in his Introduction to the Devout Life. In his fifth meditation, De Sales invites you to consider the day of your death. Will you be surrounded by friends and family? Will you be alone? Will it come sudden or after a long illness? And so on. De Sales writes,
“Consider the haste with which that body [of yours] will be hidden beneath the ground, and when that is done the world will scarcely bestow another thought upon you. You will in your turn be forgotten, as you have forgotten others.”
At this point, you might accuse Pascal and De Sales of being morbid. Their meditations on death seem perverse, no? Isn’t it abnormal to think about death like this? Isn’t it (oh sin of sins in this our hygienic and naturalistic age) “unhealthy” to contemplate your finality in such detail?
If I had to guess, at some point you’ve thought about your own funeral. Doesn’t that make you kind of a weirdo?
You and I both know there’s nothing worse than being “unhealthy” nowadays. There’s no sin more terrible. In his prophetic The Triumph the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff suggests that the therapeutic culture we live in substitutes “good” and “evil” for “healthy” and “sick.” By “good,” we really mean “healthy.” By “evil,” we really mean “sick.” Such and such person committed such and such atrocity because that person was sick.
In a world without the transcendent, in a world without the supernatural, in a world that does not admit the reality of the immaterial, all we are left with is “health” on a natural level to govern what we ought to do and not to do. What could be worse than dying? Let “health” be our guide!
We can measure health in BMI and blood pressure. I can supposedly give you some sort of battery of written tests to gauge whether or not you’re a psychopath. Put a number here, another there, and then I can add them up to see just how perverse you precisely are. I can see a healthy body. Supposedly, I can see a healthy mind. But whenever we subordinate any of our transcendent ideals like goodness, truth, or beauty to “health,” we do so because we live in an era permeated by naturalism.
One way of understanding naturalism is that it is a set of assumptions about the world we live in. Essentially, the person infected with naturalism believes the entire universe is explicable strictly in terms of natural causes. You can spot naturalism (or a tendency for it) with people who are constantly explaining the activity of the mind and human decision-making in terms of the brain, genetics, human evolution, and so on. They can’t go more than two minutes without citing a double-blind peer reviewed study. Why do people fall in love? Their genes make it so. Why do people choose this job instead of that one? Their brains do it. For all his courage and candor, the Internet famous Bret Weinstein is unmistakably wedded to naturalism. Just see his book co-authored with Heather Heying, A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century.
I’m not against science or health. I just don’t like scientism or the reduction of all human motivation to strictly natural causes. My presupposition is that your soul and my soul and everybody’s souls are immaterial. In other words, souls do not consist of matter. We can’t see or measure them in themselves. But lo! They’re real! This is a philosophical assumption, not a religious one. Aristotle presupposed as much, and he was no Christian.
Let us conclude this brief reflection by returning to Pascal who writes: “It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal.” In other words, it changes everything to know where you go after the last bit of dirt has been sprinkled on top of your grave. It affects everything, paradoxically enough, whether or not you believe the show goes on as the last act comes to a close.
If you liked this post or would like to see others like it, please subscribe to this Substack. I’ll be playing around with various types of posts in the upcoming weeks, and I’d be curious to know what types of articles interest you most. If you’d like some homework, here it is: Take any of Pascal’s aphorisms. Meditate upon it and then comment below with what came to mind. You can find an online edition of his Pensées (with an intro by T. S. Eliot) here.