Pascal And Seventh-century French Society

Seventeenth-century French is a society that peasants occupied most part of its members, an absolutism country ruled by its head, the king, and its governors, the nobles, the bureaucrats, and the landowners. Similar to any other traditional society,literature, art, science, religion and some other cultural activities that require intellectual work are accomplished by its middle or upper class members who have enough free time like the nobles, the bureaucrats, the landowners, and the bourgeois.But these people differentiate themselves in their interests, the royal court and some magnates of noble class keen on artistic glory, people who always ask why dedicate themselves into scientific study, and some others yet keep defending the ideological status of Christianity, the difference indicates the divergence inside the ruling class.Pascal’s family is of the little noble ones, and dislikes the Jesuit Society long ago,which led to his opposition to Jesuits all his life. His father didn’t send him to study in schools controlled by Jesuits, instead he taught his kids himself. The education then was controlled by Catholicism, the Jesuits was particularly wild about it. For his growing environment, his accomplishments begot Jesuits’ envy and opposition, the Jesuits hold that Pascal may infirm the rule of Catholic Church, they invariably reproached Pascal. From rejection of education provided by Jesuits, to the vacuum experiment, then to The Provincial Letters against Jesuits, and finally to The Pensées,Pascal objected to the Jesuits in both science and religion.In the view of long duration, the mutual opposition merely indicates the fall of western Christianity and the rise of rational awareness. For being educated as a humanist, Pascal became a scientist, who challenged the Aristotelian doctrine regarded as dogma by Scholasticism, and pointed out the Jesuits’ antinomy on religious taboo by his rational brain.Nevertheless, the scientist changed himself into a Christian. The detail of history is not so easy and simple. His personal problem accounts for most part of his shift,under the torturing of diseases, he has to ask God and Jesus for help; besides, the dominant position of religious ideology in seventeenth-century, his class status,the education he received, and his living environment, all of these factors made him hard to extricate himself from the course and thinking pattern of Christianity.His converting reminds us that even our science and technology are verydeveloped, we are still faced with problems that science can not solve, in what position should we place in the infinite universe, how do we discipline ourselves, how to treat the fate the nature brings us. Pascal’s answer is Jesus Christ, he thinks that the moderation of Jesus Christ is the most appropriate method, Christian religion is the only true religion that the creatures need.This paper prefers to a general grasp of Pascal’s life experience and the development of his thoughts, combining his personal life with social background,to more comprehensively understand Pascal and his thoughts, and how the subject of the fight between science and religion in history of thoughts incarnated on an individual.