Pascal’s Wager

The Man Who Played Dice with God

James A. Connor

HarperSanFrancisco, $24.95, 240 pp.
____________________________________________________________________

Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was a brilliant figure in Western thought and science, who combined a ferocious, practical mind with a deep thirst to wrestle with the most fundamental philosophical issues. He seems to have been cursed by ill health and social anxiety, which links him with other “outsider” thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, and (perhaps) Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Pascal’s claim to fame rests on very real accomplishments: he wrote a treatise on conic sections while still a teenager; he conducted seminal experiments on the nature of the vacuum; he constructed one of the first mechanical calculating machines and did pioneering work on probability and game theory; and, toward the end of his life, he established the first public-transportation scheme in Paris.

Despite all those accomplishments, Pascal is perhaps best remembered for his passionate religious faith. In the words of the famous “Memorial” found sewn in his clothes at the time of his death, his faith was not in the God of the philosophers or the scientists but in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Pascal’s faith was shaped largely by his personal involvement with the then-prominent religious movement of austere Catholics known as the Jansenists. Their adaptation of some late theorizing of St. Augustine of Hippo, as refracted through the posthumous writings of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), seemed to draw close to Calvinism, particularly its stern view of the transcendence of God, its pessimistic take on the sinful condition of humanity, and its robust defense of divine predestination. Because they thought highly of all these doctrines, the Jansenists found themselves in mortal combat with the Jesuits and, it should be added, with luminaries of the French School of Spirituality like St. Vincent de Paul.

James A. Connor’s Pascal’s Wager is a straightforward biographical account of Pascal’s life. In relatively brief chapters, he parades many luminaries of the time, including René Descartes (who seemed jealous of the wunderkind Pascal), and the major players in French spirituality. We get a glimpse of the famous convent of Port-Royal, where Pascal’s sister was a member of the community under the direction of the formidable Mère Angélique, and a blow-by-blow description of the Jesuit-Jansenist controversy. Connor is more compelling when he describes Pascal’s scientific achievements, but the book would have benefited from more illustrations of the scientist’s actual models and experiments.

The book makes much of Pascal’s famous wager (a delicious thought experiment if you accept its Christian premises), but Connor is otherwise lean on treating one of Pascal’s most enduring legacies-his scattered notes (their order is still hotly debated among scholars) published under the title Pensées. Connor, a former Jesuit and now a professor of English, is curiously inattentive when it comes to the history of theology. Pace Connor, Augustine’s teachings on free will and predestination were never condemned by Rome, although some of his interpretations were rejected; the seventeenth century did not see the birth of the spiritual counselor, a role that was already part of the monastic tradition for over a millennium; there is no compelling way to link the church’s condemnation of some Jansenist propositions with repudiation of Pascal’s own mystical experience; and finally, Nicholas of Cusa was not burned at the stake. His was a far more delicious fate: he was made a cardinal and died peacefully in is bed at the age of sixty-three. (Connor may have had Giordano Bruno in mind.)

In sum, this is a fairly readable biography of one of the most important figures in the period when European science was on the rise and beginning to challenge theology’s hegemony. Yet it is a book that tells us more about Pascal’s life in terms of that particular intellectual milieu than his influence on the development of Christian theology.

____________________________________________________________________

Walker Percy Remembered

David Horace Harwell

University of North Carolina Press,
$24.95, 200 pp.
____________________________________________________________________

Walker Percy has already had two reliable biographers, but David Harwell’s book adds important background to what has previously been published. Harwell conducted in-depth interviews with more than a dozen of the novelist-philosopher’s close friends, ranging from Percy’s housekeeper to his lifelong friend Shelby Foote, who lived close to Percy and his family in Covington, Louisiana.

My admiration for Percy’s fiction knows no bounds. He had an unerring ear for Southern life (although he did not like to be pigeonholed as a Southern writer) and a deep passion for the ultimate meaning of things. That passion was sharpened by a paradoxical juxtaposition: his commitment to the Catholic faith, to which he converted as a young man, and his close study of that arch Protestant Kier¬ke¬gaard. Percy once said that Kier¬ke¬gaard taught him nearly everything, but that Kier¬¬ke¬¬gaard’s limitations included a scant appreciation for the beauty of the natural world and an inability to understand community. These were lessons Percy learned from Catholicism.

What is most interesting to me about Percy’s view of reality is that he managed to hold together an almost Niebuhrian sense of sin in the world and a basic trust in ultimate meaning. Careless readers have marked Percy down as a conservative, while others have mistaken his mordant humor-he was an extremely funny writer-for cynicism. For all his social commentary, Percy’s main goal was to illuminate the human search. The most apt description of him can be found in his own words. The human drama is that of the wayfarer and the pilgrim: we are neither angels nor animals.

Percy’s family lineage, as these interviews make clear, tells a sad story. His grandfather and father, and possibly his mother, ended their lives by suicide. Percy’s medical practice was cut short when he contracted tuberculosis, but his recuperation was the occasion for his close reading of the existentialists. He spent most of his life in a small Southern town, writing, socializing, and raising a family. What I had not known before reading this book is that he was active in race reconciliation, not just as a talker but as one deeply involved in developing housing, a credit union, and pursuing educational reform.

Not long before his death in 1990, Percy came to Notre Dame to accept the Laetare Medal, which is presented at commencement. The main speaker that year was one of those cheery, what’s-good-for-business-is-good-for-America tycoons who gave an appalling Rotarian-style pep talk about the joys of making money. Percy spoke for just a few minutes, telling the students that the novelist is like the proverbial canary in the mine, whose duty it is to sniff out noxious gasses. The soft-spoken Southerner then leaned into the microphone to say, forcefully, that the students should beware because “it is a bad world out there.” Perhaps not the sunniest comment I ever heard at a commencement ceremony, but deeply true, and spoken with such prescience. It is my most vivid memory of this man whose books I have loved, and it came to mind again as I read this illuminating and affectionate memoir. It was a pleasure to read, and I recommend it to anyone who loves Percy’s writings.

____________________________________________________________________

Christ Is the Question

Wayne A. Meeks

Westminster/John Knox, $19.95, 166 pp.
____________________________________________________________________

Wayne Meeks, emeritus professor of New Testament at Yale, has authored a number of influential books on St. Paul, not least his brilliant The First Urban Christians (Yale, 1983), to which I often refer when teaching Paul. Meeks had not written exclusively on Jesus, so Luke Timothy Johnson remedied the situation by inviting Meeks to Emory University in 2004 to lecture on the person and work of Jesus. This slim, rich book is the fruit of that semester, honed by a number of other lecture opportunities at other schools.

The book, which is as much about how to read the New Testament as it is about Jesus in the New Testament, consists of six chapters. The critical chapter is “God’s Foolishness in a Winner-Take-All-World,” in which Meeks juxtaposes the primitive creedal formula of 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 with the elaborated hymn about Christ in Philippians 2. (Meeks is never far from Paul!) In a wonderful phrase, Meeks sees the story of Jesus as the logos of the cross.

Anyone who teaches Scripture instinctively understands that the misuse of the Bible is not only common today, it is rampant. Meeks has a wonderful chapter on that tendency to misread and a suggestion for correction. He urges a certain humility before the text, and he would like to banish the phrase “the Bible clearly teaches.” Paying implicit homage to the influence of his Yale colleague, George Lindbeck, and to the late Hans Frei, Meeks recommends that it would be better to begin by saying what we can learn from the Bible “if we stand within a certain community’s tradition,” or that we can find these ideas in Scripture “if we construe Scripture in such and such a way.”

This approach may seem tentative or even mealy-mouthed, but it becomes less so when you realize that beyond the biblical text there stand nearly two millennia of meditation, commentary, and paraphrase, and that these form a barrier between the clear meaning of the text and our understanding of it. Meeks cites with approval the observation of the former master general of the Dominicans, Timothy Radcliffe, a trained biblical scholar, in reflecting on the role of universities. They should be “places of resistance to the imperialism of the single vision.” It is not so much that this or that text has many meanings (it may, as the old patristic and medieval doctors thought), but beyond that, we never plunge so deeply into the meaning of the Scriptures that we can comfortably say a particular passage “clearly teaches” this or that.

Christ Is the Question is not a work of original scholarship but it is the distillation of decades of scholarly labor. It is accessible, unfailingly instructive, and very well written. If one would like to see a mature, learned scholar at work, this book will satisfy nicely. I found it a joy to read.

____________________________________________________________________

The Sign of the Cross

The Gesture, the Mystery, the History

Andreas Andreopoulos

Paraclete, $19.95, 165 pp.
____________________________________________________________________

In writing about the sign of the Cross, Romano Guardini encouraged his readers to make a big bold gesture whenever they signed themselves. He noted that the sign of the Cross was simultaneously an outward act of faith and a form of prayer. Making it is one of the most ancient sacramentals of Christianity. Tertullian, writing from North Africa in the late second century, described the act as something every Christian should do when leaving home. Most likely he had in mind tracing a cross on the forehead with the thumb. It is interesting that he should remark on such a gesture. With the exception of one mocking graffito of a crucified man with a donkey’s head, we have no visual example of a cross in paleo-Christian art before the time of Constantine-if we exclude hidden symbols of the Cross like those inverted anchors found on the walls of catacombs.

Andreas Andreopoulos, a young Greek Orthodox theologian, has provided us with an informative book that, in the space of less than two hundred pages, traces both the evolution of the manner of making the sign of the Cross and, equally important, the semiotics of its meaning. The history he outlines is fascinating. Andreopoulos describes how the variations of the gesture developed in both East and West, and how what seems to have been a mere difference in custom managed to become a matter of serious acrimony. After all, the schism in the Russian Church between the Old Believers and the mainline Orthodox developed, in part, over how the sign of the cross should be made. Furthermore, as President George W. Bush learned quickly to his discomfort, bearing the cross led the Western armies who marched into the Middle East from the late twelfth century on to be called Crusaders.

This book reminds us that making the sign of the cross has had many different meanings in Christian history. Not only did Constantine instruct his soldiers to carry its representation into battle at the Milvian Bridge, but early on the sign of the Cross became an integral part of monastic life. Although Andrepoulos’s focus is on the Eastern tradition, in the West countless practices testify to its importance-from venerating the relics of the true Cross, to the devotional practice of making the way of the Cross, to the numerous religious fraternities who operate under the sign of the Cross. Further, its iconic status is polyvalent. For example, in the artistic tradition alone, the form is foundational for both images of the tortured body of Christ and bejeweled crosses. The latter representation, so familiar in Byzantine mosaics, indicates that it is a sign of triumph over the finality of death.

The Cross is such an iconic presence in the Christian West and such a familiar gesture that it is easy to forget it is both signifier and something signified at the very heart of Christianity. Frequently, I have seen Christians who are resident minorities in Islamic countries with wrist or arm tattoos of the Cross-a sign of their faith. It is surely that, but making the sign of the Cross is also one of our most primitive and beautiful prayers, one that gives witness to the fundamental truths we possess: the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. This readable book explores the many meanings associated with this most common of Christian gestures and symbols. As such, it is worthy of a wide audience.

____________________________________________________________________

In Search of Belief

Joan Chittister

Liguori/Triumph. $15.95, 216 pp.
____________________________________________________________________

I am always on the lookout for good books on the creed to use in my undergraduate introductory theology courses. The creed, after all, is integral to the liturgical initiation of Christians, since it was first part of the three-fold interrogation used to scrutinize those who were being readied for baptism in the ancient church. Furthermore, as Luke Timothy Johnson argues in his very fine recent book on the subject, the church requires some set of parameters to provide identity to believers as a community. Also, the Nicene Creed has been the subject of some excellent coherent reflections at the ecumenical table. The specific articles of the creed, finally, are excellent launching pads for further explorations into the belief system of the church. It is no accident that Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity revolves around the creed, or that the Catechism of the Catholic Church, following an old catechetical traditon, frames its opening on the creed. As the late Jaroslav Pelikan pointed out in his capstone volume, Credo, one already detects fragmentary creedal statements in the New Testament, such as the opening verses of 1 Corinthians 15.

The second edition of Sr. Joan Chittister’s book on the creed (originally published in 1999) thus stands in a long, distinguished line of books on the subject and I took it up with some eagerness. Alas, it is not all that sophisticated theologically. Chittister uses the articles of the creed not so much for illumination as for support. While her individual chapters treat, albeit gingerly, the theological truths behind the spare affirmations of the creed, most of the book is taken up with autobiographical reminiscences, homilies on the failure of the institutional church, exhortations concerning this or that cause, and feminist rereadings of the theological tradition. In itself, there is nothing obnoxious about the latter (some people do it with acuity, for example, Elizabeth Johnson and my late colleague Catherine LaCugna), but the issue of the use of language carries with it certain radical theological consequences that an author must contend with. Chittester fails to do that.

Her exuberant style is her trademark. She exhibits indefatigable energy while living in a whorl of speaking, writing columns and op-ed essays, and pouring out books. Such a schedule may make reflective writing for a book on a subject like this more difficult.