“Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their faith, those who profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in presenting it to the world, that it is a foolishness, _stultitiam_; and then you complain that they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not be keeping their word; it is in being destitute of proofs that they are not destitute of sense.”
His solitary argument, the one to which he clings desperately and devotes all the power of his genius, is the very condition of man in the universe, that incomprehensible medley of greatness and wretchedness, for which there is no accounting save by the mystery of the first fall:
“For man is more incomprehensible without that mystery than the mystery itself is incomprehensible to man.”
He is therefore reduced to establishing the truth of the Scriptures by an argument drawn from the very Scriptures in question; and—what is more serious—to explain a wide and great and indisputable mystery by another, small, narrow and crude mystery that rests only upon the legend which it is his business to prove. And, let us observe in passing, it is a fatal thing to replace one mystery by another and lesser mystery. In the hierarchy of the unknown, mankind always ascends from the smaller to the greater. On the other hand, to descend from the greater to the smaller is to relapse into the condition of primitive man, who carries his barbarism to the point of replacing the infinite by a fetish or an amulet. The measure of man’s greatness is the greatness of the mysteries which he cultivates or on which he dwells.
To return to Pascal, he feels that everything is crumbling around him; and so, in the collapse of human reason, he at last offers us the monstrous wager that is the supreme avowal of the bankruptcy and despair of his faith. God, he says, meaning his God and the Christian religion with all its precepts and all its consequences, exists or does not exist. We are unable, by human arguments, to prove that He exists or that He does not exist.
“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, because, having neither divisions nor bounds, He has no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is.”