Man

This chapter considers the implications of the Infini rien distinction for man across five Pascalian themes: the heart, prayer, divertissement, the hateful self, and martyrdom. The heart is shown to be the name given by Pascal to human personhood, the dimension of the human being set at once in and beyond nature. The heart is related to human nature, able to see it, to know it, to integrate it. The heart also transcends nature in its receptivity to what lies beyond the created whole as its principle and end. In its transcendence of nature, the heart finds a deep and radical freedom to determine its ultimate orientation to the truth: whether it will accept or reject created nature and its own place in the created natural order. The heart is faced, ultimately, with the question of whether it will turn in receptivity to divine truth and be ordered in cooperation with it or, instead, treat itself as center and its preferences as what is ultimately real. Prayer is the characteristic activity of the heart ordered toward God: participation in the sustenance and growth of one’s own being through imitation of the divine act of speech, which is generative of all being. Made fully manifest to God, the heart is made fully manifest to itself. Divertissement is the characteristic behavior of the heart turned toward itself as self-creating, ordering principle of all things. Incapable of sustaining this fiction, it diverts its attention so as to conceal its per se nothingness. This concealment always presupposes the concealment of God: God is hidden behind the self-concealment of the person. Divertissement is the metaphysical inversion of prayer. The diversionary self, turned from God and its own nature, is in a condition of ontological ingratitude. The ingratitude of self-love is hateful because it hates createdness: it hates the truth which makes it, and all things, to be. The hateful self refuses to make the Infini rien distinction, or, having made it, chooses the distinction’s second term. The overcoming of the hateful self requires a return to what it has concealed: God and nature. Acceptance of death for the sake of God is the highest expression of assent to nature as created and given. The hateful self that would make itself the center of all things loses even itself in its own nothingness; in accepting its own nothingness for the sake of God, the heart receives all things as they really are, on the basis of union with the transcendent God who makes all things to be. The heart of the martyr has made the Infini rien distinction fully.