When it comes to the subject of death, Pascal would not be a “good communicator”. Against all the rules of the profession, he made it his task to cause his “target” to leave his “comfort zone.” He presses us – and with what vehemence! – to fear death. That might be tolerable, if he also counselled us to avoid it – but no. Rather, he does not forget that an honorable man chooses to run the risk of death for a just cause: “Fear death when there is no danger, and not when there is, for one must be a man.” Pascal proceeds in the opposite way from the maxims that govern us today. While we are bombarded with recommendations to avoid at all costs everything that could lead us to death, at the same time that our eyes are blindfolded to everything that could make us even think of death, to say nothing of what perhaps follows after, Pascal presses us to think constantly about death and what perhaps follows after, while dissuading us from seeking to avoid it when the cause is honorable. In this connection, we recall Socrates’s response to those who would reproach him for having engaged in conduct that put him in danger of death:
For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being. […] but I do know that it is bad […] to do injustice.
Socrates seems to say here – this would be his response to Pascal – that death cannot weigh on our life more than we know about it, and that in any case it weighs less than the thing we know, which is that to commit an injustice is an evil, and therefore it is dishonorable to commit an injustice out of fear of death. Pascal would grant that an honorable man knows more certainly what an injustice or a dishonorable conduct is than he knows what death is, but would contest that this is an argument for not seeking to know, or decreeing this ignorance insurmountable. Moreover, this ignorance would seem to equally justify two opposed attitudes. One would say: if I know nothing about death and what follows it, if I can know nothing about it and therefore if there is nothing for me to know, then for me it is only an accident, the final accident of my life, and the stopping of my heart has no more meaning than the stopping of my watch. The other would say: if I know nothing about death and what follows it, and if I can know nothing about it, then I have equal latitude, and an equally powerful motive, to fear as much as to hope. Indeed, it seems that Socrates could have said with equal right: because no one knows anything about death, they do not know if it is not the greatest of evils for human beings. Without wanting to draw a teaching from a few lines from the Apology, it seems clear that Socrates does not envisage that one has reason to fear what comes after death. Moreover, the philosophy of the Ancients does not seem to have seriously contemplated the possibility of a personal immortality.
In any case, Christianity in an extraordinary way inflamed the concern for what comes after death. The Last Judgment, the Dies irae, does not resemble the ticket offices of the mythological underworlds or the tribunals of souls by means of which pagan philosophers occasionally illustrated their political and moral teaching. The Christian Judgment is not the court of last resort which completes and possibly corrects the insufficiencies or errors of human justice. It brings with it a criterion proper to it, not the rules of human justice, even the most perfect, but the God-man, Creator and Redeemer, whose plan of salvation each human being welcomes or rejects. The Resurrection of Christ, the first born of the dead, banished the Greeks’ Hades as well as the Sheol of the Jews where the dead led a spectral existence deprived of God. Christianity put at the center of its proposition not simply the perspective of the survival but the divinization of the whole person by his participation in the divine life. In the Christian world, what follows death acquired an intensity of presence, if I can put it that way, which had no equivalent in the pagan world or in ancient Judaism. The advent of Christianity did not render the immortality of the soul and the alternative between Heaven and Hell more certain, or even more probable, but it made them more possible so-to-speak, more conceivable, because they were envisaged with much more seriousness than previously.
(excerpted from Chapter 7)
