17th Century French so-called libertine writing was stylistically all over the map. Still, style was important. The following takes its cues primarily but not exclusively from Pierre Bayle’s Diverse Thoughts on the Comet (1683).

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I sometimes wonder what sort of accomplishments Blaise Pascal would have been capable of had he not been drawn into the Jansenist versus Jesuit conflict that boiled over in mid-17th Century France. I wonder how much of what he did accomplish was lost after his death due to the religious fervour of his sister and niece, the two people primarily responsible for shaping his image as an earthly genius who turned his back on such pursuits to focus on a higher calling. While historians have established his engagement with earthly affairs up until the end, they are also aware that documents, such as correspondence with fellow mathematicians, were purposefully destroyed (Le Guern, XXVI).

Then I reflect on the wars of religion that preoccupied Montaigne at the end of the 16th Century, Rousseau’s religious struggles in the 18th Century and, to shift religions rather than periods, Spinoza’s writings and subsequent exclusion from Amsterdam’s Jewish community. There was, and still is, a great deal of religious strife going around. If it was not Jansenists against Jesuits, Pascal would likely have been sucked into some other clash.

It can also be argued that the temperament driving his involvement in debates on effective grace and the infallibility of the pope was not all that different from that behind his air-pressure experiments, draining wetlands in Poitou and, as he was about to shuffle off this mortal coil, working through the logistics of a mass transit system for Paris (cf. Mesnard 1965). The heady mix of passion and meticulousness was necessary for both and he would not have accomplished much of anything without it. The argument obviously does not follow the dualistic portrait his surviving family painted of him. That should probably count in its favour.

While far from its centre, Pascal and his pensées were no stranger to the libertine community of his day. Many preoccupations, religious and otherwise, were shared. Temperaments, on the other hand, were vastly different. If we want to explore the sort of character capable of thinking about Jesuits and Jansenists without taking the fight all that seriously, there are better options than imagining a counterfactual Pascal. Charles Marguetel de Saint-Denis, Lord of Saint-Évremond, would serve our purposes nicely, though focusing on him to the exclusion of others would simply not do.

Digging into the conflict is beside the point. Rather, it is to explore some currents of not-all-that-serious thought running through the Enlightenment important for understanding the period. By serious, I mean profound meditation and rigorous experimentation. Not-all-that-serious then was a mix of lighter reflections, conversational contemplations compatible with polite society, musings that leaned into burlesque and satire, and so on. This would not include serious study of what was labeled a frivolous topic, such as Pierre Gassendi’s thorough work on Epicurean philosophy.

Of course, some lighter work, including Montaigne’s Essays, Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and Voltaire’s Candide, is so well ensconced in the Enlightenment tradition that any retread would risk wearing it through. What makes Pascal interesting as a starting point is that he was at the crossroads of complex technicality, weighty theology and the relatively trivial. His famous wager on the existence of a Christian God, which was but one fragment of his Pensées, is a case in point. Michel le Guern nicely sums up the context and challenges:

“One cannot present this fragment without addressing the highly controversial problem of the place it should take in the whole of the Apology [of religion]. In reality, one finds oneself faced with an unsolvable problem. Everything leads to the conclusion that the four pages containing the fragment constitute in themselves a complete and independent apology, intended for an audience of libertine gamblers Pascal met among the friends of the Duke of Roannez, and written before the composition of even the project of the grand apology. This explains the technical character of the wager’s argument, and responds to the objections many times raised against it: it only has force for a gambler, but, since it is only addressed to gamblers, one cannot fault it for that. In effect, it seems that one can date the fragment to 1655: the extremely technical form the theme of the wager takes in its second version makes one think of Pascal’s work on calculating probabilities, and more specifically of the letters to Fermat on the subject, which are dated 1654. It is at the demand of the gamblers of the Duke of Roannez’s entourage, particularly of [Antoine Gombaud, Knight of] Méré, that Pascal undertook this research” (676 n. 1).

In my admittedly limited experience, the wager tends to be presented as a broadly applicable thought experiment. Though the lights of human intelligence are too dim to illuminate the infinite that is God, they are capable of running through the logic that weighs finite hardships of religious observance in this life against the chances, however remote, of infinite felicity or damnation. It is at the same time more compelling than arguments for the existence of a god that claim certainty and categorically awkward. Playing the odds on eternal life seems tantamount to letting the money changers back into the temple–incompatible with any sort of genuine faith.

As with the Jansenists versus Jesuits, the point is not to thoroughly analyze the fragment, only to show that its argument is far more comprehensible when the relatively trivial is given its due. The trivial comes in many forms, as mentioned above. Évremond, like Méré, wrote a great many reflections that were the continuations of salon conversations. Agreeableness, decorum, and refinement were the order of the day. Being an honest person was the ideal. Although honesty was not exactly the same for men and women, it was an ideal for mixed company. Women, such as Mlle de Scudéry, hosted the salons and, in that role, were largely responsible for setting the tone for everyone (cf. “Jugement sur Sénèque, Plutarque et Pétrone” 675).

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Where does my scribbling fit in? Évremond wrote to prolong the agreeable conversations of polite society and Pascal wagered at the request of that very same society. What exactly have I been hoping to accomplish? Nothing, really. Let us take a detour into the world of another enlightened libertine, Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, to expand on that.

Several years ago, I unanimously decided that Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1849) and Raymond Queneau’s Saint Glinglin (1948) fell within a newly minted category of gonzo-ly mythic and solidly lithic. The first had a memorable scene of the devil flying the titular hermit up to the heavens where nothing but emptiness and aeroliths awaited them. The second featured the inadvertent melting of the father’s religious symbol, an imposing megalith, as a result of the son’s attempts to bring water to a parched land. My sixth book, Our New Neolithic Age (2021), was on one level a possible answer to the question of what such a mythically lithic story might look like in this century.

At that time, I did not seriously engage with the content of Flaubert’s devilish dialogue. Given how close the argument came to Spinoza’s take on substance, determinism and so on, one could say that there are weightier treatments of the matter more conducive to seriousness. Whole academic careers have focused on the philosophy of writers like Flaubert, though, and there is something with a certain gravity to be said about how Spinoza is interpreted and blended with Leibniz, Eugène Burnouf’s take on Indian Buddhism, Plotin, Democritus, and so on. It would be tempting to say that I do not mean to make light of Flaubert’s words. As noted, the opposite is true.

Spinoza is famous in part for taking Descartes’ geometric (Cartesian) method to the highest of heights. The hermit’s flight resembled a fever dream, so perhaps a geometrician’s dream is exactly what the doctor ordered. Diderot happened to dream up such a dream, with his sometime encyclopedic collaborator d’Alembert as the geometrician. Let us join a conversation between the two people taking care of the sickly savant, Mlle de L’Espinasse and the doctor Bordeu. They are in the midst of discussing the patient’s semi-coherent, semi-conscious ramblings.

“Mlle de L’Espinasse: (Doctor, what is the sophism of the ephemeral?)

Bordeu: It is that of a short-lived being who believes in the immutability of things.

Mlle de L’Espinasse: Fontenelle’s rose who was saying that in the memory of roses no one had ever seen a gardener die.

Bordeu: Precisely. That is light and profound.

Mlle de L’Espinasse: Why don’t your philosophers express themselves with his grace? We would be able to understand them.

Bordeu: Frankly, I don’t know if his frivolous tone is appropriate for serious subjects.

Mlle de L’Espinasse: What do you call a serious subject?

Bordeu: Well, general sense experience, the formation of the sensitive being, its unity, the origin of animals, their lifespan, and all the questions related to it.

Mlle de L’Espinasse: Me, I call that the follies I am permitted to dream about, when I sleep; but with which a man of good sense who is awake will never occupy himself.

Bordeu: And why is that, if you please?

Mlle de L’Espinasse: It’s that some are so clear that it is pointless to search out  the reason for them; others so obscure that one sees practically nothing, and all are of the most perfect uselessness.

Bordeu: Do you believe, miss, that it is indifferent to deny or admit a supreme intelligence?

Mlle de L’Espinasse: No.

Bordeu: Do you believe that one can take a position concerning the supreme intelligence, without knowing what to think of the eternity of matter and its properties, the distinction between two substances, the nature of man, and the production of animals?

Mlle de L’Espinasse: No.

Bordeu: These questions are then not as idle as you were saying” (367-8).

Fontenelle’s rose is from his Interviews on the Plurality of Worlds, a series of dialogues intended to popularize astronomy. It was first published in 1686, just nine years after Spinoza’s passing–24 years after Pascal’s death–and within Leibniz’s–and Évremond’s– lifetime. From Cyrano de Bergerac’s Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon to Pierre Bayle’s Diverse Thoughts on the Comet, “light and profound” treatments of aeroliths, more or less imaginatively construed, abounded in 17th Century France.

Plurality of Worlds’ preface begins with:

“I am in more or less the same situation where Cicero found himself, when he undertook to put in his language the substance of philosophy, which until then had only been dealt with in Greek. He tells us that people said that his works would be particularly useless, because those who loved philosophy, having taken pains to find it in the Greek books, would after that overlook the Latin versions, which would not be the originals; and that those who did not have the taste for philosophy, would not bother to look at it either in Latin or in Greek.

To that, he responded that, very much on the contrary, those who were not philosophers would be tempted to become one by the ease of reading the Latin books; and that those who were already philosophers by the study of the Greek books, would be very content to see how such things would have been handled in Latin” (1189).

Fontenelle concludes that “Cicero was right to talk like that,” but that he himself lacked the same “reasons for confidence.” In the end, “it could very well be that in searching for a middle ground where philosophy is suitable for everyone, I found one where it is suitable for no one; middle grounds are too difficult to hold, and I do not believe I have any desire to go through the trouble a second time” (1189-90). While never aiming to popularize philosophy per se, I share his imbalance between the technical and the accessible, and the resulting doubts.

And yet. I remember being taken aback when an acquisitions editor from the publisher of my first novel, Cowards, opined that they would be further ahead if they brought out an out-of-print title I had listed as a major influence rather than publishing my book. It was A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator by Ludvík Vaculík. Though not at all what the editor was getting at, I came to realize that Vaculík did a much better job than I at finding and holding this mythical middle ground. I had my own Cicero moment at the outset and stumbled on regardless.

The funny thing is that Fontenelle’s sentiments would have resonated with Vaculík. A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator was a collection of samizdat newspaper articles written in Czechoslovakia during the normalized socialism period, post-1968. The authorities were aware of what he was doing–thus the title–and Vaculík was aware that they were aware. He believed the reason his work was tolerated was because it was practically useless: those who were trying to change the situation had no need for it and those who were passive were not incited by it to act.

On one level, it is not clear what my scribbling accomplishes, any more than Vaculík’s was for him. On another, it can be seen as quite simple: we are doing something that takes us out of ourselves. By this, I do not mean that we forget ourselves or our conditions, nor that we become some sort of passive consumer of entertainment in a Guy Debord-esque society of spectacle. It is a diversion, however, and, as Pascal’s and Évremond’s take on such things show, how one views diversions depends a great deal on temperament.

Pascal:

“Misery.

The only thing that consoles us in the midst of our miseries is diversion [divertissement]. And at the same time it is the largest of our miseries. Because it is that which principally stops us from thinking of ourselves, and which makes us imperceptibly lose ourselves. Without it we would feel ennui, and it is this ennui that would push us to search for a more solid means of getting out of it, but diversion amuses us and delivers us imperceptibly to death” (fr. 393, 671).

Évremond:

“In order to live happily, it is necessary to reflect little on life, but rather to frequently go out as in beyond oneself; and among the pleasures that foreign things provide is evading the consciousness of one’s own ills. Diversions take their name from the diversion they offer from objects vexing and sad, by means of pleasant and agreeable things: which is sufficiently shown by the fact that it is difficult to overcome the harshness of our condition by any force of mind, but by skill one can ingeniously turn away from it” (“Sur les plaisirs, à M. le comte D’Olonne” 656).

These are extreme positions that should not be taken too literally. Our pleasures, just as much as our miseries, are part of who we are. And vexing objects become agreeable things when turned on their head. Hyperbole aside, the distinction is evident. Pascal was a problem solver, whether that problem was earthly or heavenly, and had a confidence bordering on arrogance (see for instance his treatment of Father Antoine de Lalouvère during his roulette competition (367)) in his ability to work things through. And, whether his confidence was justified or not, history is full of bread and circuses supporting his point that distractions from woes often end up worsening them.

Évremond was skeptical about our ability to fundamentally improve our condition. Like Pascal, the principle concern is death:

“If I write a long discourse on death, after having said that meditating on it is vexing, it is that it is impossible to not reflect on a thing so natural: there would even be a sort of weakness [mollesse] in never daring to think about it. But whatever one says, I cannot support the particular study of it; it is an occupation too contrary to the usage of life” (657).

From this, he extrapolates to “sadness, and all sorts of chagrin” (657). They are natural, so cannot and should not be completely ignored. Indifference and asceticism are just as “contrary to the usage of life.” They also cannot in any meaningful way be overcome, so there is no point in stewing on them. If one has the capacity to reflect on and communicate insights into the nature of man and the universe in ways that are neither pointless nor obscure, as Fontenelle thought Cicero had and Diderot’s Mlle de L’Espinasse thought Fontenelle had, so much the better. For some of the rest of us, being agreeably amused by mythical lithics is about as solid as it gets. Let he with greater force of mind cast the first stone, as it were.