Born in Clermont on May 2, 1588, Étienne Pascal was the son of Martin Pascal, the treasurer of France, and Marguerite Pascal de Mons. A member of the noblesse de robe, an affluent social class of lawyers, he would occupy a series of prominent political offices and remain closely involved in the affairs of the French court, as his ancestors had done. In 1610 he completed his law degree from the University of Paris and returned to his native Auvergne, where he purchased the office of counselor for Bas-Auvergne. (Such outright purchase of political offices was not unusual in France at that time.) From an early age, he combined his legal and political activities with a passion for scientific and mathematical research. This passion would be pursued in the informal scientific academies of Clermont and Paris.
In 1616, Étienne Pascal married Antoinette Begon. Three of their children survived into adulthood: Gilberte (b. 1620), Blaise (1623), and Jacqueline (b. 1625). In 1625 he became the president of the Cour des Aides, a tax court located in Clermont. After the death of his wife in 1626, Étienne made the unusual decision to educate personally all three of his children. For a man of his wealth and social status, the obvious choice would have been to send the children to boarding schools run by the appropriate religious orders or to hire tutors to teach the children at home. Some commentators have ascribed this pedagogical decision to concern for Blaise’s sickly condition. A more plausible explanation is Étienne’s desire to cultivate personally the genius he already recognized in all three of this precocious children and the desire to remain physically close to children who, like their father, were plunged into mourning after the untimely death of a beloved mother.
Even when it is intellectually rigorous, homeschooling often results in the social isolation of the pupils concerned. Such was not the case in the Pascal household. After Étienne moved to Paris in 1631, he introduced his son to the scientific circle of Père Mersenne. Astonished by Blaise’s mathematic genius, the fellowship members encouraged him on the research which led to the publication of his first major work, Essay on Conical Sections, in 1640. The family’s court connections introduced daughter Jacqueline to Queen Anne of Austria and her entourage, leading to the publication of her book of poems in 1637. During the period of residence at Rouen (1640-1650), where Étienne acted as the chief superintendent of taxation in Normandy, she participated in the family salon, visited by many of the province’s eminent literary and scientific figures. The dramatist Pierre Corneille personally encouraged her poetic development.
The curriculum of this home education reflected the interests of Étienne: classical languages, poetry, and above all science and mathematics. His participation in Mersenne’s academy earned the respect of its most distinguished members. In 1635 Mersenne dedicated his Treatise on Organs to Étienne Pascal “in order to witness to posterity the esteem I have for your great erudition in every branch of mathematics.” Roberval supported his position in the salon debate over the nature of gravity. In 1637 Fermat wrote his Solution of a Problem Proposed by Monsieur Pascal. Étienne Pascal is still celebrated in the history of mathematics for his discovery of a geometrical curve popularly known as the Limaçon of Pascal.
Étienne Pascal gained broad public recognition as a scientist in 1634 in a dispute with Jean-Baptiste Morin, who had proposed a solution to the vexed question of how to determine longitudes. Since the question had clear political and economic consequences, inasmuch as the determination of longitudes helped to establish national and imperial borders, the French government took a particular interest in the issue. It offered a substantial financial prize for a convincing solution. Prime Minister Cardinal Richelieu established a five-man commission to evaluate Morin’s proposed solution. A commission member, Pascal vehemently criticized Morin’s methodology: “Monsieur Morin commits a vicious circle. He wants to correct the [longitudinal] tables by the methods he proposes but he had previously founded these very methods on the truth of these tables.” The controversy between Pascal and an enraged Morin would linger until 1647.
As Blaise matured, Étienne become his son’s advocate in Blaise’s youthful scientific controversies. He defended his son’s position in the controversy over the existence of the vacuum. While Blaise insisted that vacuums could and did exist, neo-Aristotelian philosophers argued that it was an impossibility since “nature abhors a vacuum.” When the Jesuit Père Noël attacked Blaise’s theory in 1648, Étienne denounced the polemical rhetoric used by Noël: “You have used a style of writing so obviously unjust that it is not only your enemies who disapprove of it. They want to wean you away bit by bit from a style that is offensive on every count. It will cause countless problems for you.”
The philosophical loyalties of Étienne Pascal also appear during these years of home-schooling. Against Descartes’s criticisms, he praised Fermat’s work De maximis et minimus. During salon debates he criticized Descartes’s Discourse on Method as containing a series of unconvincing proofs.
Certain Augustinian traits also appear in his beliefs. He criticized the efforts of Cartesians and Thomists to provide philosophical proofs for God’s existence, God’s attributes, and the immortality of the soul. The affirmation of basic Christian truths concerning God and the soul’s destiny can only be grasped through faith and submission to God’s revelation. In his memoirs, Père Beurrier recalls Blaise Pascal’s impressions of the split between faith and reason in his father’s philosophy: “He [Étienne Pascal] gave him [Blaise Pascal] the maxim that everything which is an object of faith should not be submitted to the judgment of natural reason because it was far above it.” This fideist suspicion of rationalist theology will durably mark the philosophy of religion embraced by his children and even grandchildren.
A certain Augustinianism also appears in Étienne’s instinctive animus toward the Society of Jesus. He persistently opposed the construction of a Jesuit college in Clermont. The fundamental project of Jesuit humanism, the construction of a Catholic theology on the certitudes of neo-Aristotelian philosophy—which in turn reflects a world in which grace builds on a weakened but not corrupt nature—contradicted Pascal’s vision of science and religion as two radically separate spheres of human knowledge. This strict separation between faith and empirical science will influence his children’s epistemology, although in the later stages of Jansenist fervor, Blaise and Gilberte will dismiss scientific research as only another expression of human vanity.
Étienne’s tutelage of his children did not end with the passage of their childhood. After his fall on the ice in Rouen in 1646, he acquired the services of the Deschamps brothers, lay doctors who were disciples of Saint-Cyran, the propagator of Jansenist doctrine in France. Quickly adopting the Jansenist creed, Étienne introduced Blaise and Jacqueline to this radical version of Augustinianism, with its emphasis on human depravity, denial of natural virtue, predestination, and the omnipotent efficacy of God’s grace. Gilberte and her new husband Florin joined the Jansenist circle shortly thereafter. The original outburst of spiritual enthusiasm was soon followed by careful study of Augustinian works: Augustine himself (especially The Confessions and The City of God), Bernard of Clairvaux, Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, Saint-Cyran, and Jansen himself. This apprenticeship into radical Augustinian philosophy and theology was complemented by personal acquaintance and correspondence with leading thinkers of the Jansenist movement, notably Arnauld and Nicole. In the subsequent writings of the children and grandchildren, these authors regularly reappear as part of the Augustinian culture Étienne Pascal provided to his descendants. The exacting efforts of Gilberte to provide a strictly Jansenist education for her children indicate the depth of the Augustinian convictions she had developed during her years with her father.
(excerpted from chapter 1)
