Explainer

Creed

Distraction

19 June 2023

8 min read

How to escape 'the sole cause of unhappiness'

Our capacity to distract ourselves from the bigger questions is nothing new. Born 400 years ago this month, Pascal noted something similar and that got him thinking. Graham Tomlin tells his story.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An engraving of Pascal's showing him raising an eye brow.

Blaise Pascal almost raises an eyebrow at today's distractions.

Clermont Auvergne Métropole, Bibliothèque du patrimoine, GRA 6025, via Wikimedia Commons

A recent survey of belief in Britain yielded a confused result. Belief in God has declined, yet belief in the afterlife has risen. People are less likely to see themselves as religious, and don’t pray much, yet continue to trust religious organisations. We are caught between belief and unbelief.

A guide to our times might just be found in one of the greatest geniuses of the modern world, born 400 years ago this year – on 19th June. Blaise Pascal died before he reached the age of 40, and lived much of his life in chronic sickness, but in less than four decades he became one of the most famous and celebrated minds in France, conducting ground-breaking scientific experiments in a range of fields of physics, laying the foundations of probability theory, building one of the very first functioning calculating machines - a precursor to the computer, playing a key role in a start-up company which provided one of the first urban public transportation systems in Europe, and writing one of the great classics of satirical French literature – the Lettres Provinciales.

Yet he is best known today for a book that he never finished.

The thoughts

Pascal was born into a well-to-do middle class French family, the son of a tax official in the civil service. Although his mother died while he was still a toddler, his father recognised the extraordinary talent of his young son and decided to home-school him along with his two sisters. Theirs was a fairly conventional Catholic family and yet in time they came under the influence of an intensely devout movement in 17th century French religion, the Jansenists. Taking their name from a Belgian Bishop, Cornelius Jansen, their world-denying piety and ongoing feud with the powerful Jesuits made them a controversial group in the landscape of French religion at the time.

Blaise himself had a somewhat distant relation to the Jansenists, being much more interested in his investigations into physics, geometry and mathematics that began to raise eyebrows all over Europe. That was until a dramatic event on the 23rd November 1654. Not much is known about this life-transforming experience, but for two dramatic hours late that evening, Pascal experienced a profound encounter with the God who had always been vaguely in the background of his life but not a compelling presence.

The change was radical if not total. He didn't give up on the life of the mind, but instead started to think deeply about how to change the minds of the many cultured despisers of religion he had come to know through his scientific researches and through his exposure to the fashionable salons of Parisian life.

As various thoughts on this project occurred to him, he began to write them down on scraps of paper. Some were brief enigmatic sentences that clearly made sense to him but to no one else; others were a paragraph outlining a radical thought; some were longer, more reasoned pieces, carefully developing an argument. He died before he was able to finish this great Apology for Christianity and left behind a haunting, tantalising collection of fragments, which were collected together by a group of friends after his death and published as the Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion et sur Quelques Autres Sujets – or Pascal’s Pensées, for short.

Pascal had a problem in trying to do this. He knew from his own experience that piling up arguments as to why God might exist, or that you should think about God once in a while, don’t get you very far. They tend to produce at best a lukewarm, distant kind of religion that is more of a burden on the soul than a liberating presence, the kind of passive, slightly reluctant faith that he had held until that dramatic November night. They also point you towards the wrong God, the ‘God of the philosophers’ as he described it in his famous phrase, a God who is the logical conclusion of an argument rather than a living, breathing, haunting presence, both majestically distant and yet hauntingly present at every moment. He also knew that you can't manufacture profound experiences of the presence of God such as had happened to him. It was at the heart of St Augustine’s teaching, as conveyed through Jansenism, that only God's grace can shift the stubborn human heart, kindling in it a love for God that until that point was impossible to imagine, let alone experience.

Pascal was fascinated by our capacity to distract ourselves from the bigger questions of life and death. Is there a God? Who am I? Which religion is true, if any of them? What happens after our brief lives are over? If we are a tiny speck of life on a tiny insignificant planet within the vast expanses of space that were beginning to be discovered at the time, what possible significance can we have? How do you explain the monstrous contradiction of human beings who have the capacity for compassion, understanding and greatness and yet also for cruelty, bestiality and shame?

In the room

These are all big questions on which our eternal destiny depends, and so should occupy our minds day and night, and yet we have a remarkable capacity to distract ourselves from thinking about them. Silence and inactivity are unbearable to us and so we fill our time with (in his day) hunting, cards, conversation, tennis. As he put it, “the sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” He would have marvelled at our age with Twitter, TikTok, 24-hour TV and the myriad ways we find to divert ourselves during the most fantastically distracted age there has ever been.

And so Pascal tries to unsettle his reader, trying to stir up the instinct to consider deeper questions. Yet he still knows that even when we do start thinking about these things, we get muddled. Is there a God? Religious people say Yes; Atheists say No. Pascal knows enough of science to know that it is not capable of adjudicating on such questions, that evidence of miracles or biblical prophecies are ambiguous, and certainty is impossible to find. So what do you do when you're intrigued by religion but there isn't enough evidence to push you across the line to be a Christian? When one moment you're convinced God is real, but the next you doubt the whole thing?

Maybe you give up on it - get back to scrolling through TikTok videos, watching the football on TV, musing over Harry and Meghan? Yet Pascal says you can't just do that. You have to live your life as if there is a God and you need saving, or as if there isn't, and you don’t. And you and I will face the consequences of that choice after our lives are over, one way or the other.

This is where one of Pascal's most distinctive moves comes in. Among his sophisticated friends, were many who spent hours betting. Pascal had already done a playful bit of work working out the odds on certain bets, and what the likelihood was all victory and defeat in an uncompleted game – for cricket fans, a kind of early Duckworth-Lewis method for gambling with dice.

The wager

Pascal’s argument runs like this: If you were strictly speaking betting rationally on the odds, then you’d always bet on God. If you bet on God not existing, and there is no life after this one, and you’re right, you don’t gain a great deal – just a few brief years’ pleasure while you’re young and fit enough to enjoy it. But if you bet on God existing, and there is a life beyond the here and now, and you end up being right, you stand to gain a huge dividend – eternal happiness in the presence of God – all this for the sake of a tiny stake – a life of discipline and self-denial for a few years here on earth. So looking objectively and rationally at the odds on offer here, a betting man or woman would always bet on belief. But Pascal knows that we don’t think that way. Why? It’s not because we are being rational; it’s because belief is inconvenient, we would rather there was no God, it costs too much, and we just don’t want to believe.

So if the evidence is inconclusive, and you're aware that your own motives are mixed, then what do you do? Pascal thinks we are creatures formed by habit. So his advice is to start living as if it's all true even if you're not sure whether it is. Wise people in the past “behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said and so on….” Start practising the habit of daily prayer to God even if you're not sure whether he's listening or not. Start treating each person you meet each day as if they're not just another inconvenience in your path but someone precious, loved by God and created in his image. Start going to a church regularly meeting with other Christians for that kind of mutual strengthening of faith that only being with others can bring. Take the bread and wine of Holy Communion as if they really are the gift of Christ’s presence to you. And see what happens.

Start living

Pascal reckons, sooner or later, as had happened to him and countless others, belief will surely follow behaviour. Start living as if it is true and slowly (or perhaps dramatically) you will realise not only that it is true, but that it brings far more joy and delight than you ever thought possible.

T.S. Eliot once wrote:

“I can think of no Christian writer… more to be commended than Pascal to those who doubt, but have the mind to conceive, and the sensibility to feel, the disorder, the futility, the meaninglessness, the mystery of life and suffering, and who can only find peace through a satisfaction of the whole being.”

If we live in a culture that profoundly doubts God, yet which at the same time longs to find happiness, then perhaps Pascal is just the kind of guide we need.

Explainer

Creed

3 January 2025

5 min read

Creator or creature – a centuries old question of identity

Why does a 1,700-year-old creed still matter?

Frances Young

Frances Young is Emeritus Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham.

An abstract depiction of The Creation shows an aperture in a cloud like formation over water.

The Creation, James Tissot.

James Tissot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

2025 will be the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicaea Creed. In October 2024, Prof. Frances Young gave the inaugural lecture of the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project at St Mellitus College.

In the year 325CE the first ever “ecumenical” (= “worldwide”) council of bishops assembled at Nicaea near Constantinople (now Istanbul). It was summoned by Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity and patronize the Church. Why does this seventeenth centenary of an obscure discussion around complex words matter to us today?

The outcome of the Council was agreement to the text of a creed, and banishment of a pesky priest named Arius, whose bishop disapproved of his teaching. Unfortunately, some other bishops remained sympathetic to something like Arius’ viewpoint, and for political reasons Constantine was desperate for Church unity. Argument over the issues went on for half a century, until another Council in 381CE reaffirmed the position established in 325CE and agreed the version labelled “the Nicene Creed” and still used in Church liturgies across the world today.

The controversy was basically about the identity of the pre-existent Word or Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. Nicaea established that the Son was “of one substance” (homoousios) with the Father – in other words, he was fully God in every sense of the word. But for many traditional believers at the time this was difficult to accept.

The common sense of the culture thought in terms of a “chain of being.” Most people in the Roman Empire were polytheists – there were loads of gods: Mars, god of war, Nepture, god of the sea, and so on. Each city, each ethnic group, had its own god, as did every family, every interest group, every burial society – you name it. But generally there was a sense that above all these was the Supreme God, who was worshipped indirectly through worship of these lower gods, and below them were all sorts of nature spirits, daemons, benign and malign, then souls incarnate in human persons, then animals, even vegetables as living entities, and finally inert matter like earth and stones, at the bottom of the hierarchy or chain of being.

Jews identified their God with the Supreme God and insisted the one God alone should be worshipped. But they also imagined a heavenly court of archangels and angels, then below that the souls of the righteous, and so on in a somewhat parallel hierarchy. No surprise then that Christians assumed a similar picture: God, then the Son of God, then the Holy Spirit, then archangels and angels, then souls, and so on in a hierarchical ladder.

But in the second century Christians had argued their way to the idea of “creation out of nothing.” Many non-Jewish thinkers, including some early Christians, followed Plato, conceiving creation as the outcome of Mind (the Demiurge or Craftsman) shaping Matter into whatever Forms or Ideas were in mind. But other Christian thinkers argued that God was not a mere Craftsman who needed stone or wood to work on like a sculptor – God produced the Matter in the first place. This then triggered a full-blown critique: God did not create out of pre-existent Matter or there would be two first principles; God did not create from God’s own self or everything would be divine; so God must have created out of nothing.

Now try to fit that to the chain of being: where do you draw the line between God the Creator and everything else made out of nothing? This was the issue which surfaced in the so-called Arian controversy. What we might call the “mainstream” remained wedded to the hierarchy, not least because of earlier controversies about God’s monarchia. The word did mean “monarchy” – single sovereignty; but arche could mean “rule” or “beginning,” so monarchia also referred to the single first principle of all that is. It was natural to attribute monarchia to God the Father, a view that worked OK with the hierarchy. But some had suggested that the one God 'changed mode', as it were, appearing now as Father, now as Son, now as Holy Spirit, taking different roles in the overarching scriptural story. This suggestion was mocked as all too similar to the pagan god, Proteus, who in mythology kept changing shape. It is even possible that that key word homoousios had been condemned along with this “Modalist” view.

Traditionalists were suspicious. The first historian of the Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, was present at Nicaea, and wrote a somewhat embarrassed letter to his congregation explaining how he had come to agree to this formula. Even Athanasius - the one who would come to be regarded as the staunch defender of Nicaea - largely avoided the term for a quarter of a century, though that does not mean he did not identify the principal issue. He campaigned hard and ended up in exile five times over. The fundamental issue was whether Christ was God incarnate or some kind of divinised superman, or a semi-divine mediating figure, a created Creator. Arius is supposed to have said, “there was a when he was not,” even though he was “the first and greatest of the creatures” through whom God created everything else.

So why does it still matter? Four simple reasons:

Because it was basically about identity, and the question of Christ’s identity still matters.

Because we still find people treating Jesus Christ as superhuman – not really one of us, or semi-divine – not God in the same sense as the God the Father. If we are to be ecumenical, across different denominations today but also across time, we need to affirm that God’s Son and Spirit are truly of the one God. As early as the second century the first great Christian theologian, Irenaeus, characterized the Word and the Spirit as God’s two hands – we can imagine the Trinity reaching out first to create and then to embrace us with God’s redeeming love.

Because it means we can look to Jesus and there catch a glimpse of God’s very own loving face - not just a dim image but the reality itself.

And because only God could recreate us in God’s own image and raise us to new life.

To find out more about the McDonald Agape Nicaea Project being held by St. Mellitus College in London, come and join the public lectures, or look out for other Nicene celebrations in 2025.

For more information or to register for these events, you can visit the Nicaea Project website

The Nicaea Project