The New Lifetime Reading Plan

His finest, but to us not most interesting prose, is contained in his Provincial Letters, which you will find in most editions that print the Pensйes. These letters are masterpieces of

polemic, directed against certain tendencies of the Jesuit order of PascaTs day, tendencies he and his associates of the Jansenist movement considered too tolerant of man^ moral frailties. (Jansenism was a kind of puritanical sect within Catholicism, stressing predestination and asceticism, but also inspiring new and brilliant techniques in the education of chil- dren.) This controversy, which made Pascal a bestseller, is today of interest mainly to theologians and historians of reli- gion.

The Thoughts, or Pensйes, are in a somewhat different cate- gory. They consist of a series of scrappy, often unfinished notes, originally intended to serve as parts of a grand design, a reasoned defense of the Christian religion against the assaults or the lethargy of freethinkers. Into them Pascal put his painful sense of the inadequacy, even the absurdity of man, as mea- sured against the immensity of the universe, the endless flow of eternity, and the omniscience and omnipotence of God. A great deal of modern antihumanist pessimism flows from Pascal. Those who reject man as the center of the universe, whether they are religionists or nihilists, find the Pensйes to their taste. He represents one profound mood of mankind, that which finds man glorious in his powers yet in the end pitiful and incomprehensible to himself.

The nonscientific Pascal is preserved by his style and by his emotional intensity. As a psychologist of the soul his genius is measured by the fact that he can still move many who are quite unable to sympathize with his sometimes noble, sometimes merely frantic devotionalism. Two Pascalian sentences, or cries from the heart, are frequently quoted. The first is "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." The second is "Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." Between them these two statements suggest moods common to ali men and women, whether they be Christian, agnostic, atheist, or of some other creed.

C.F.

48

JOHN BUNYAN

1628-1688 Pilgrim⁹s Progress

A hundred years ago anyone who spoke of a muckraker or a worldly-wise man or Vanity Fair or the slough of despond or the valley of humiliation would have known he or she was quoting from Pilgrim's Progress. For over two centuries, start- ing with the publication of the first part in 1678, this book was probably more widely read among English-speaking people than any other except the Bible. It cannot, of course, speak to us as powerfully today as it did to the plain, nonconformist folk of Bunyan's time, wrestling with their conviction of sin, fearful of HelFs flames, hoping devoutly for salvation. And yet, for ali its revivalist theology and its faded Dissenters devotionalism, it is still worth reading, not alone for its historical importance, but as a work of almost unconscious art.

We marvel that Christianity could have been founded by so few men, most of them obscure and unlettered. The miracle seems a little less baffling if we consider that these men may have been like John Bunyan. Recall his life: a poor tinker and ex- soldier, almost completely unschooled—indeed he tells us that at one point he had forgotten how to read and write; converted to the Puritan creed; arrested in 1660 as "a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles^>>; spending, except for a few weeks, the next twelve years in Bedford jail; refusing the conditions of release: "if you let me out today, I will preach again tomorrow!"; leaving behind him a wife and four children, one of them blind; spending his imprisonment in writing as well as in memorizing the Bible and John Foxe's Book of Martyrs; jailed again for six months in 1675, during which time he wrote the first part of Pilgrim's Progress; released once more, only to become one of the most popular preachers of his time.

Written in what is now quaint English, Pilgrim's Progress is a

simple allegory for simple people, offering terribly simple answers to the dread question, What shall I do to be saved? It is whole cul- tures remote from Augustine [22] and Dante [30], whose books it in certain respects resembles. Its faith recognizes only a black-and- white ethic. It appeals to a ferocious piety (though Bunyan himself was kind and tolerant) discoverable today only in our intellectual backwoods. And its author, with his dreams and voices and visions and his skinless conscience, was, no doubt of it, a fanatic who would offer Freud [98] a perfect field day.