A Theory of the Aphorism by Hui Andrew;

Author:Hui, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Ciphers of the hidden God

“Languages are ciphers in which letters are not changed into letters, but words into words. So an unknown language can be deciphered” (S465/L575). This fragment might very well serve as Pascal’s theory of interpretation. Again and again in the Pensées he labored to reconcile the literal and the figural in the scriptures, so much so that this massive heap of texts itself also assumes the status of a cipher. The reader in turn must work to decipher the “unknown language” of the Pensées. In Pascal’s hermeneutics, one seeks meaning in a text in the same way one seeks God, for meaning in language and meaning in God are both hidden.

Pascal reflects on the hidden nature of God in a number of passages: “God begins thus hidden, any religion that does not say God is hidden is not true, and any religion that does not explain it is not instructive. Our religion does all this. Truly you are a hidden God” (S275/L242, quoting Isaiah 45:15). Pascal writes in a letter to Mademoiselle de Roannez, “Having concealed himself in all things for others, he has uncovered himself in all things and in so many ways for us” (ed. Sellier, 709); “God is hidden. But he lets himself be found by those who seek him. Visible signs of him have always existed throughout the ages” (S785/L992). Three hundred years later, Simone Weil would write in her luminous, aphoristic Gravity and Grace: “The absence of God is the most marvelous testimony of perfect love, and that is why pure necessity, necessity which is manifestly different from the good, is so beautiful” (106).

Faced with the dual nature of divine presence and absence, Pascal’s poetics is suspended between kataphasis and apophasis, the theology that uses respectively “positive” or “negative” ter minology to describe God.23 At its extreme, Pascal’s apophatic poetics is recorded in his famous “night of fire” (nuit de feu) of November 23, 1654, the mystical experience of rapture that marked his definitive conversion to Jansenism. The vestige of this experience is inscribed on a parchment sewn into the lining of his coat, found after he died:

FEU.

« DIEU d’Abraham, DIEU d’Isaac, DIEU de Jacob »

non des philosophes et des savants.

Certitude. Certitude. Sentiment. Joie. Paix.

DIEU de Jésus-Christ.

Deum meum et Deum vestrum.

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