Holy Fire

The evening of August 19, 1662, one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers of the age died, perhaps of a brain aneurysm. Blaise Pascal was only thirty-nine. A few days following his death, his servant was putting his clothes in order when he noticed a curious bulge in the deceased man’s doublet. Sewn into the lining was a small, folded parchment written in Pascal’s own hand. It recorded an ecstatic vision Pascal had experienced eight years previously. He appears to have made the record immediately in the aftermath of the event, and the stark, staccato language reads like the sudden irruption from beyond the veil that it was:

The year of grace 1654, Monday, 23 November, . . . From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight, FIRE. GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob not of the philosophers and of the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace. GOD of Jesus Christ. My God and your God. Your GOD will be my God. Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD. He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel. Greatness of the human soul. Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy . . . Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ . . .

Pascal never referred back to those luminous two hours, and it is impossible to say what transpired. Wordless communion? Angelic ministering? Visionary worlds? Language never before uttered but heard by him? Two lessons, at least, we can reasonably infer.

First, we can venture what the “certitude” referred to might be—and it was more than a simple statement about the reality of God. For Pascal, as for most Christians then as now, questions about the existence of God were seldom in play. The first great age of skepticism was still a century away. The words of the poet Robinson Jeffers applied to seventeenth-century Europeans like Pascal as well as to ancient Greeks: “O happy Homer, taking the stars and the gods for granted.”

What was in doubt was the only thing about God that really matters: in what does his nature principally consist? The paramount revelation to Pascal in the dark of that November night was by way of a correction. God was not the God sought and proclaimed by the philosophers and the learned—of whom Pascal himself was exhibit A. He later expounded the identity of that God of the patriarchs he had come to know:  “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Christians, is a God of love and comfort, a God who fills the heart and soul of those whom he possesses.” 

Institutional Christianity struggled to reconcile the suffering, incarnate Christ with the demands of classical philosophical influences. In part because the church soon acquired the very trappings of power and sovereignty that Jesus had repudiated. In the background, the human desire for a zero-sum universe of equity and fairness and retributive justice competed with a challenging new ethic of asymmetrical love and forgiveness. Under these pressures, increasingly, the God of the philosophers (the timeless, transcendent God without body, parts, or passions) supplanted the God of the disciples—in many cases with surprising self-awareness. One prominent Christian theologian of our own day writes with startling condescension that hoping to find a correct understanding of God from the earliest Christians is “expecting far too much.” Another similarly holds that “we should not be surprised” that “people so close to the apostles . . . understood the central mystery of the faith so badly.”

Pascal’s certainty about God’s nature paralleled the apostles’ understanding, no matter how unsophisticated philosophically or theologically. The first disciples knew God to be love in the only way anyone experiences absolute love. Love is interpersonal, relational, costly, and inexhaustible. Rather than see them as first-century theological unsophisticates, the gospels affirm that these disciples knew firsthand who the early Christian convert Mathetes called the “Nourisher, Father, Teacher, Counsellor, Healer,” the God revealed in Jesus Christ. John Burnaby was correct in this regard: “It was as a person, living, speaking, acting, and suffering, that Jesus was known to his friends; and when the fourth gospel was written, the church was assured that to know Jesus in this way was to know his father also.” That seems to have been the certitude Pascal experienced. God is the God of love and comfort who fills the soul as we come to know him. 

The second lesson that may be drawn from Pascal’s memorial is the lesson of sacred silence. Pascal kept the parchment that commemorated his holy encounter concealed for two reasons: to maintain throughout his life the sacred privacy of his experience; and to wear it near his breast as a private, tangible, ever-present memorial of an encounter that shaped his subsequent life. Our access to the holy of holies may depend in part on our kindred capacity to cherish and nourish and safeguard those glimpses of the divine with which we are gifted.

The question all this leaves unaddressed, of course, is how can I experience the certitude—the conviction beyond any possibility of doubt—that I am loved as Pascal knew himself to be loved? Even in a community of faith, even sharing a common canon, common foundational teachings, and a shared revelatory heritage—it is unlikely that any two mental constructs of God held by any two modern disciples follow identical outlines. 

Matthew 7:23 anticipates a day when Jesus will say to many professed disciples, “ye never knew me.” In discussing this scripture with a small group, we referenced the prayer of C. S. Lewis (who was paraphrasing Augustine): “May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.” That petition has always struck me as the most fruitful consideration when aspiring to a prayer-centered life. The perpetual pursuit of self-honesty, and an openness to a revelatory process of learning to know God, go hand in hand. In this discussion, I was surprised by a young woman’s comment. “I fully expect,” she said, “when I meet the Lord he will be different than I imagined.”

What moved me was the tone behind her comment. Not fear that she had God wrong. Not disregard for the stakes or blithe acceptance of our limited light. She seemed, rather, to be expressing with hopeful optimism what one of the greatest early Christian teachers wrote: “For whatever it is that we are able to sense or know of God, it is necessarily to be believed that he is by many degrees far better than what we perceive him to be.”

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

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