Third Meditation: What Is a Person?
n'est inconcevable a l'homme. (§122 in the current
Pleiade edition)(This effluence appears to us not only impossible;
it seems indeed very unjust: for what is there more
contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than
eternally to damn an infant incapable of will, for
a sin wherein he appears to have so small a part,
as it was committed six thousand years before he
was in existence? Certainly nothing offends us
more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without
this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we
are incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our
condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss, in
such a way that man is more inconceivable without
this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to
man.)131This is, as it happens, entirely backwards. Generally speak-
ing, there is something deeply attractive in Pascal's cosmic
despair-the pervasive plangency of its melancholy, its occa-
sional ghastly sublimities, its dreamlike vagrancies amid the
vastitudes of a suddenly unfamiliar universe- but, whenever
one catches a glimpse of the specific doctrinal commitments
sustaining that despair, the picture begins to lose its enchant-
ing pathos and to become instead something noisome, mor-
bid, even a bit diabolical. For me, this passage is an exquisite
specimen of the way in which Christians down the centuries
(and, I like to think, Western Christians with a special genius)
have excelled at converting the "good tidings" of God's love in
Christ into something dreadful, irrational, and morally horrid.