DESCARTES TO BERKELEY Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused or disabused; Created half to rise and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled— The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! (P II,13) The solution to this riddle is contained in the Christian doctrine of the Fall It is as clear as day that the human condition is twofold If humans had never been corrupted they would have enjoyed in their innocent state both truth and happiness If they had never been other than corrupted, they would never have any notion of either truth or happiness But the Fall, which is the key to understanding of ourselves, is of all Christian teachings the one most shocking to reason: What is more contrary to the laws of our wretched justice than eternally to damn a child with no will of its own for a sin in which the child had so small a part to play that it was committed six thousand years before the child came into existence? Certainly, nothing shocks us more deeply than this doctrine Nevertheless without this most incomprehensible of all mysteries we are incomprehensible to ourselves (P, 164) But if reason revolts at the idea of the Fall, reason can also establish the idea’s truth The starting point is nothing other than human misery: The greatness of man is so evident that it can be inferred even from his wretchedness For that which is nature in animals we call wretchedness in man And by this we recognize that his nature being now like that of the animals, he is fallen from a better nature which formerly was his For who is unhappy at not being a king, except a deposed king? (Ibid.) Although Pascal believed that only faith could lead us to saving truth and that only grace could give us lasting happiness, in his philosophical writing he was not the enemy of reason that he is often made out to be His bestknown aphorism, of course, is ‘the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing’ But if we study his use of the word ‘heart’ we can see that he is not placing feeling above rationality, but contrasting intuitive with deductive reasoning—rather as we speak of learning mathematical tables ‘by heart’ We can see this when he tells us that it is the heart that teaches us the foundations of geometry In this he was not at all at odds with Cartesian rationalism 57