Doubt v Fire - Why discovering how Blaise Pascal encountered God changes our grasp of faith.

About this sermon

Gavin Ashenden and Sean Walsh are two Catholic post-academics who have conversations about believing. Sean and I have been working our way, in conversation, through the philosophers who interest us. There are, I think, two ways of looking at what we’re doing. On one level, it might appear that we are simply two rather bookish post-academics, passing the time discussing obscure subjects that interest us—and, perhaps, no one else. But there is another way of seeing it. All the ideas we live with—those that shape our culture, our instincts, our assumptions—spring from deeper philosophical roots. And the more we understand those roots, the easier it becomes to recognise which ideas are helpful to the Catholic faith, and which place unnecessary obstacles in its path. The truth is that our present culture owes far more to René Descartes than it does to Blaise Pascal. There is, in one sense, an advantage to that. Descartes helped lay the foundations for the extraordinary civilisation that has developed over the past two or three hundred years—one marked by immense advances in science, technology, and our capacity to understand how the world works. And yet, at the same time, he sowed seeds of doubt—about who we are, why we are here, and what we can truly know. This culture of doubt, and the habit of relentless self-analysis that flows from it, has made it far more difficult to embark on a journey of faith. It has often seemed that the truly intelligent person is the one who doubts most effectively. But there is a problem here. Doubt, when elevated in this way, makes our capacity to reason the measure of everything. And that is a mistake—because our capacity to reason cannot, in fact, measure everything. Pascal was no less intelligent than Descartes. But there were two decisive differences between him and the great architect of doubt. The first is that Pascal was profoundly interested in Jesus Christ, and understood that God can only truly be known through Him. This led him to a radically different vision of God—not an abstract, distant creator, like the absent clockmaker of philosophical speculation, but a God who reveals Himself personally and decisively in Christ. The second is that Pascal underwent a profound encounter with God on the night of November 19, 1654—an experience that transformed everything: his mathematics, his understanding of himself, and his vision of reality. If we could recover Pascal’s way of seeing the world—if we could show how it is more humane, more truthful, and ultimately more compelling than the vision we have inherited from Descartes—we might begin to reshape a culture that has become, in many ways, closed to faith. At present, we are burdened by a set of inherited intellectual prejudices that must first be overcome before we can even begin to speak meaningfully about Jesus Christ, salvation, and the reality of the supernatural. Sean and I have greatly enjoyed these conversations about Pascal, and we both feel a strong affinity with him. We hope you will enjoy them too—and that you may discover in them something both new and helpful for your own pilgrimage, your own journey of discovery.

Topics

• Faith