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vision" that is organically related to its time and place. (The influence
of the Lukacs of
History and Class Consciousness
is apparent here. Gold–
mann, so far as I know, is the only critic writing in the West for whom
Lukacs' work, particularly what was written before 1924, is crucial.)
Most of
The Hidden God
is taken up with applying these notions to
Pascal. Goldmann begins first with the individual
pensee,
then moves to
Pascal's theory of knowledge, his esthetics, ethics, religion and his pecu–
liar life. The
pensee
is a fragment, one in a series that Georges Poulet
compares to a line of closing windows, that formally reflects Pascal's
sense of scientific discreteness-this is Pascal the geometer and Cartesian
scientist, the acerb rationalist who wrote the
Provincial Letters.
Yet the
Pensees
do form a coherent body that derives its integrity from Pascal's
own community with Port-Royal, which, as Sainte-Beuve said, was the
religious enterprise undertaken by the aristocracy of the middle class.
For Goldmann, Port-Royal expresses the extreme Jansenist world vision.
As
a community, however, Port-Royal denied its connection with the
world, for reasons Goldmann ascribes to the high bourgeoisie's loss of
political and economic influence in Louis XIV's France. Pascal's family,
for example, opposed the monarchy that had deprived it of political
position, but remained dependent on it for economic identity. Yet Port–
Royal remained a part of the world, albeit a withdrawn and dissenting
part, and this was a paradox Pascal intensely felt. The strength of his
feeling is based on his conviction that Jansenism was morally right, that
the world was wicked and the Church in need of reform, but that Jan–
senism, despite its reclusion, was irrevocably committed to concrete
existence in the world.
Goldmann convincingly demonstrates that this paradox extends to
Pascal's sense of God and man. For Pascal, there is no question that
God exists; but because the world is morally wicked He is not apparent
in it:
vere tu es Deus absconditus.
He is thus both present and absent,
a Hidden God. Man is an isolated individual in the world, lost in the
eternal silence of vast expanses. Yet, as an individual, man is hateful
unless he is redeemed by Christ, God the Mediator. It is here that
Goldmann is most brilliant, for he shows that Pascal's Christ is "an
exemplary incarnation of the tragic mind," a figure who in Gethsemane
demonstrates the essential and recurrent Christian paradox in which
"every moment in life commingles with death": Christ clearly sees his
isolation and his disciples' betrayal of him, yet he feels the charity by
which his death will transform them into a community of the faithful.
The
total
Christian man, a man who can combine his individuality and
his sense of community, is to Pascal only a hope never to be realized;
