"Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them"
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Pascal is fencing with two opponents at once: crude skepticism and crude credulity. The line has the snap of a man who knows exactly how easily “faith” can be used as a loophole for intellectual laziness, and how easily “reason” can be used as a solvent that dissolves anything it can’t immediately verify. So he draws a boundary that still feels modern: faith doesn’t get to overrule the senses like a petty dictator; it gets to speak where the senses go silent.
The subtext is defensive and strategic. Pascal isn’t trying to domesticate religion into bland rationalism, but he is trying to protect it from becoming self-discrediting. If faith is “against” what we see, it turns into a permanent argument with reality, which means it will lose to reality in the long run. By calling faith “above” the senses, he gives it a different jurisdiction: not physics, but meaning; not measurement, but metaphysics; not the data, but the ultimate frame we use to live with the data.
Context matters. Pascal is writing in a 17th-century France where the new authority of science (the telescope, the vacuum experiments, the mathematics he helped advance) is rearranging what educated people think counts as knowledge. He’s also a Jansenist, steeped in a severe, Augustinian Christianity that distrusts easy optimism about human reason. The brilliance is the tightrope: he accepts empirical observation without surrendering the human hunger for transcendence. It’s less a truce than a jurisdictional map, drawn by someone who understands that modernity isn’t coming, it’s already here.
The subtext is defensive and strategic. Pascal isn’t trying to domesticate religion into bland rationalism, but he is trying to protect it from becoming self-discrediting. If faith is “against” what we see, it turns into a permanent argument with reality, which means it will lose to reality in the long run. By calling faith “above” the senses, he gives it a different jurisdiction: not physics, but meaning; not measurement, but metaphysics; not the data, but the ultimate frame we use to live with the data.
Context matters. Pascal is writing in a 17th-century France where the new authority of science (the telescope, the vacuum experiments, the mathematics he helped advance) is rearranging what educated people think counts as knowledge. He’s also a Jansenist, steeped in a severe, Augustinian Christianity that distrusts easy optimism about human reason. The brilliance is the tightrope: he accepts empirical observation without surrendering the human hunger for transcendence. It’s less a truce than a jurisdictional map, drawn by someone who understands that modernity isn’t coming, it’s already here.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
|---|---|
| Source | Blaise Pascal, Pensées (posthumously published 1670). Common English rendering: “Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.” |
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