In chapter 18, Deposed Royalty: Pascal’s Anthropological Argument Groothuis puts forth Blaise Pascal anthropological argument to answer man’s deepest question, as expressed in Shakespeare’s King Lear, “Who is it who can tell me who I am?”
In chapter 18, Groothuis focuses on two uniquely biblical beliefs: that humans are created in God’s image and likeness, and that they have fallen into sin. No non-biblical worldview makes these claims.
Human Greatness and Misery
Pascal: Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness” (Pensees, p.76).
Pascal argues that the mystery of human nature can only be explained if we appeal to the Christian Scriptures, which are to be esteemed as propositional revelation from a personal God.
No Consolation from Philosophy
Pascal claims that merely human philosophies are unable to tell us who we are because they fall into two equal and opposite errors concerning humanity. They either exalt greatness at the expense of wretchedness, like Epictetus and Stoicism, which lapses into presumption and pride or exalt wretchedness at the expense of greatness like Montaigne and Skepticism which lapses into despondency. Pascal said that both “break and destroy each other to give place to the truth of the Gospel” (Ibid., p. 403).
Transcending Human Philosophy
Pascal believes the Gospel harmonizes the contradictions “by a wholly divine act” that unites the respective truths and expels all falsehoods; it thus creates “a truly celestial wisdom in which these opposites” are brought together conceptually in a way unknown to merely “human doctrines” (Conversation, p. 403).
Pursuing the Best Explanation
Pascal describes humans as deposed royalty. Humans show signs of being both royal and wretched. We don’t fully understand the fall but once we accept it, it helps us understand why man is both wretched and royal.
Chesterton compares this explanatory situation to our vision in relation to the sun:” The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism (by mysticism, Chesterton means Christian theism) explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility” (Orthodoxy, p. 29).
The Abductive Argument: The Best Explanation
Pascal’s argumentation is neither inductive nor deductive, nor is it merely fideistic theological assertion. Rather, it is an appeal to a compelling explanation, a postulate that illuminates material that would not otherwise be as intelligible or significant.
Abraham Heschel: The Bible is God’s anthropology rather than man’s theology (God in search of Man: A philosophy of Judaism, p. 412).