what is the self-pensees

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WHAT IS THE SELF? IMITATIONAND SUBJECTIVITY IN BLAISEPASCALS PENSESmoth_1616 417..436

WILLIAM WOOD

It is a truism of contemporary theological anthropology that the Enlighten-ment has bequeathed to us an impoverished conception of the self. Fairly ornot, this conception is often traced back to Ren Descartes. The so-calledCartesian self is a fully autonomous, disembodied and self-transparentthinker. It is not essentially related to other persons, whether human or

divine. Indeed, this self is not even essentially related to its own body.

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Yeteven as theologians hurry to distance themselves from the Cartesian subject,they often overlook one of its first and greatest critics, Blaise Pascal. Thisoversight is unfortunate, for Pascal presents a robust account of subjectivitythat is not only anti-Cartesian but theologically rich.

To be sure, it is widely recognized that Pascal wrestles with the deepparadoxes of human subjectivity in his Penses. He famously declares thatthe human being is a thinking reed, a creature that is simultaneously greatand wretched. Our wretchedness testifies to our greatness, which in turn

reinforces our wretchedness, in an endless dialectic (L122/S155).

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The mostplausible explanation for this paradoxical dialectic, according to Pascal, isthat we have fallen from some previously ideal state, exactly as Christianityteaches. The dialectic of greatness and wretchedness is a relatively transpar-ent theme in an otherwise opaque text and so it has been much discussed.3

Pascals theological account of subjectivity stretches considerably beyondthe dialectic of greatness and wretchedness, however.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Jean-Luc Marion and his onetime student,Vincent Carraud, brilliantly analyzed the anti-metaphysicaland therefore

William WoodOriel College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 4EW, [email protected]

Modern Theology 26:3 July 2010ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


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anti-Cartesiancharacter of Pascals account of subjectivity.4 Both scholarsrecognize that Pascal is frequently motivated by theological concerns. Still,without wishing to denigrate their work, it is also the case that neither

Marion nor Carraud gives Pascal his full due as a theological thinker. Theiraccount of human sin is thinner and less nuanced than Pascals own. ForPascal, as for Augustine, sin is duplicity and so duplicitous subjectivity issinful subjectivity. Once we recognize this point, we can read the Penses asa theological text from beginning to end. By contrast, Carraud insists thatPascals only properly theological account of the self is found in the dialec-tic of greatness and wretchedness; he thereby misses the fact that the rest ofPascals thoughts about duplicitous subjectivity also concern fallen subjec-tivity and are therefore equally theological.5 Marion, for his part, correctly

argues that Pascals Augustinian account of the self equates subjectivitywith love, but he does not fully explore Pascals own insight that tyrannicalself-love is also socially-expressed and duplicitous and therefore can mani-fest, paradoxically, as a kind of dependence. Furthermore, as I discussbelow, neither Marion nor Carraud grasp the full weight of Pascals briefaccount of non-duplicitous, Trinitarian subjectivity. More work thereforeremains to be done.

In this article I aim to develop a fully theological, yet still Pascalianaccount of human subjectivity. Exegetically, I argue that the Penses them-

selves present two such accounts, both developed as rival answers to Pas-cals explicit question What is the self? (L688/S567). The first account is aportrait of fallen subjectivity, selfhood under the reign of sin. On thisaccount, Pascal argues that the self is imaginary, in a special sense. It is onesown imaginative construal of oneself. What I call my self is just the storythat I tell to myself about myself, my subjective narrative identity. Thissubjective self is an imaginary construct that typically does not correspondto the way I really am. It is in fact doubly imaginary because one always seesoneself through the eyes of other people. My subjective narrative identity is

therefore the story that I imagine that other people would tell about me.Pascal calls this doubly-imaginary self the moi. Pascals second accountof the self is a portrait of authentic subjectivity. This account is explicitlyChristological and even Trinitarian. Pascal argues that authentic subjectivityderives from ones membership in the body of Christ. This account ofauthentic subjectivity is tantalizingly brief, but it is clearly present in thePenses.6

Constructively, I use Pascals two accounts to argue that whether sinful orsaved, our subjectivity is performative and imitative: whether under sin or

under grace, to be a self is to imitate God. As sinners, our duplicitous sub-jectivity is a dreadful parody of Gods loving act of creation. Conversely, asauthentic Trinitarian subjects, we imitate Christ, the only fully real humanbeing, by turning away from the self and loving God above all things. Eitherway, at the deepest core of our subjectivity we cannot help but imitate God.

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What is the Self?

Before I present Pascals two accounts of subjectivity, it is helpful to see howPascal himself frames the question those accounts are meant to answer. In

fragment L688/S567, Pascal straightforwardly asks: What is the self? (Quest-ce le moi?). Pascal asks but does not answer this questionthe fragmentends in aporia. As he dismisses various solutions to his question, it becomesapparent that to be a self is to be a proper object of love but we are not toldwhat kind of self, if any, could be such an object.

What is the self? [Quest-ce le moi?]

A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I pass by, canI say he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in

particular. But what about a person who loves someone for the sake ofher beauty; does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beautywithout destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her.

And if someone loves me for my judgment or my memory, do they loveme? Me, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities without losingmyself. Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul?And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of suchqualities, which are not what make up the self, since they are perishable?

Would we love the substance of a persons soul, in the abstract, whateverqualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong.Therefore, we never love anyone, but only qualities.

Let us then stop scoffing at those who win honor through their appoint-ments and offices, for we never love anyone except through borrowedqualities (L688/S567).

Rather than giving a direct answer to the fragments opening question, Pascalpresents three scenarios: a pedestrian casually spotted from a window, a

woman loved for the sake of her beauty, and someone else loved for the sakeof his mental attributes. It is immediately striking that in all three scenarios,the self in question is presented not as an agent, but as the passive recipientof the attention of others. Furthermore, the nature of that attention is alsospecified. In this fragment, at least, to be a self is to be the object of love. 7

Even in the first situation, the wish that the man in the window should bethinking of me in particular connotes love.

This fragment bears close scrutiny. It is significant that Pascal investigatesthe nature of the self by asking what is the moi? rather than what am I?,

as Descartes asks in his Meditations.8

The French word moi has no exactEnglish equivalent. It corresponds to the regular pronoun me, of course,but it can also mean the self, myself, the I, or personal identity gener-ally. As I discuss below, Pascal also uses the ordinary term le moi in atheoretical way, to name the doubly-imaginary, socially-constructed persona.

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In this fragment, Pascals emphasis on the objective case instead of the nomi-native (Quest-ce le moi?) is clearly a methodological choice that anticipatesthe major themes of the fragment. The picture of the self on display here

is seen most clearly when contrasted to that of Descartes. Indeed, manyscholars believe that this fragment is a direct reaction to the Meditations, andthat Pascal deliberately borrows and subverts key Cartesian images in it.9

At the broadest level, this fragment rejects Cartesian claims of autonomyand self-transparency. Pascal implies that introspection cannot reveal thenature of the self because the self is partly constituted from without. Whereasthe Cartesian subject is separate from the world, separate even from the bodythat it inhabits, Pascal takes it for granted that to be a self is to be embeddedin a network of relations, a world. Indeed, the self considered as moi is

dependent upon others for its very existence. Alone, I am I but I needothers to be me. Consequently, if it is me I am investigating (or, better, ifI am not really an I at all, but a me) then I cannot not properly studymyself in isolation.

Recall that toward the end of his second meditation, as Descartes seeks tounderstand the nature of the self, he speaks of looking out his window at themen on the street below. He judges that they are indeed men even though,strictly speaking, all he really sees are coats and hats. He concludes from thisexperiment that it is his mind, and not his bodily senses, that grasps the men,

just as it is his mind that grasps the underlying essence of a piece of wax thatis melted and reshaped until all its contingent qualities are stripped away. Hethen concludes that he himself is fundamentally mind, not body, and that hecan perceive his own mind more clearly than anything else.10

Pascal presents a similar scene, but he inverts it. In Descartes, the self is thewatcher at the window, the one who melts the wax, the one who voluntarilyperforms the philosophical therapy of meditation in order to establish itsown certain existence and (only after so doing) the existence of others. InPascal, the self is watched from the window, and its qualities are progres-

sively stripped away as if it were the wax. When its qualities are strippedaway, Pascal seems to suggest, nothing at all remains of the self and sonothing remains to be known or loved.

In the fragments first scenario, the self as such is not really encountered atall, because it not made the object of loving affection. The second scenariodeclines to identify the self that must be loved with the transient physicalattributes that often elicit love. The third rejects the equation of the self withones subjective mental life (ones judgment or memory) for the same reason.Pascal also specifically declines to identify the self with the substance of the

soul. He thereby departs from the Aristotelian and scholastic traditions, sincein classical metaphysics, a substance, by definition, is what underlies change.In those traditions, the substance of my soul could indeed be construed asthat which I most truly am because the substance of my soul would preservemy identity through all temporal and physical changes. Pascal refuses to

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identify the self with the substance of the soul, because an abstract soul-selfcannot be a proper object of love.

In this fragment, Pascal thus presents what might be called a negative

ontology of the self. We are told that the self is not isolated from the world,not fully autonomous, not exclusively an agent, and not a unitary, imperish-able substance. As is frequently the case with viae negativae, however, thefragment seems to end in aporia: it does not tell us anything about what theself actually is. Pascal suggests that we need to be seen, thought about and,ultimately, loved in order to be; but what others see, know, and love is not us,but only borrowed qualities. At the fragments end, we have been givenno answer to its opening question, nor have we learned what kind of self canbe an object of love.

The False Self

We learn Pascals first answer to this question elsewhere in the Penses. If oursubjectivity is called into being by love, it follows that the kind of self we areis determined by the kind of love that calls us into being. Thus, in the fallenworld, under the reign of sin, our idolatrous, disordered love can only callinto being a false, imaginary self. The story of the birth of the false self is whatI am calling Pascals first account of human subjectivity.

According to Pascal, only an imaginary self can seem worthy of love and soeach person pretends to posses desirable qualities that he does not really have:

We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being.We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try tomake an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve ourimaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we are calm, or gener-ous, or loyal, we are anxious to have it known so that we can attach thesevirtues to our other existence; we prefer to detach them from our realself so as to unite them with the other. We would cheerfully be cowards

if that would acquire for us a reputation of bravery. How clear a sign ofthe nullity of our own being that we are not satisfied with one withoutthe other and often exchange the one for the other! For anyone whowould not die to save his honor would be infamous (L806/S653).

Pascal here posits a duality in the self, a separation between our imaginarybeing that exists only in the minds of others and our own, real being, theprecise nature of which is not specified. It seems fairly straightforward to mapthe imaginary being of L806/S653 onto the moi of L688/S567 (discussed

above) and conclude that the imaginary being, the self as it exists in the eyesof others is the moi that is constructed by the world.11

In contrast with the motif of passivity in the earlier fragment, however,now it appears that each person actively welcomes and constructs thisseparation. Pascal uses an array of first-person plural action verbs to paint




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a picture of a self that is not only an agent but a whirlwind of activity. Itthus corrects the rather one-sided picture of the self offered by L688/S567.We are not merely constructed by the world with no agency of our own;

rather, we are co-authors of our imaginary selves. But we must also note thekind of activity to which fragment L806/S653 refers. The verbs Pascaldeploys are, without exception, verbs of desiring, and collectively theypaint a picture of the self as an agent whose only activity is craving: weare not satisfied . . . we want . . . we try . . . we strive constantly . . . we areanxious . . . we prefer. . . . And what we crave, without exception, is theesteem of others. Note, however, that our desire for esteem is markedly notthe desire actually to be worthy of esteem, but rather a desire for esteemas such, regardless of whether we deserve it. Pascal writes:

Greatness of man. Our idea of mans soul is so lofty that we cannot bear tobe despised and not enjoy the esteem of a given soul. All the happinessof men lies in this esteem (L41 1/S30).

For whatever possession he may own on earth, whatever health or essen-tial amenity he may enjoy, he is dissatisfied unless he also enjoys the goodopinion of his fellows. He so highly values human reason that, howeverprivileged he may be on earth, if he does not also enjoy a privilegedposition in human reason, he is not happy. This is the finest position on

earth; nothing can deflect him from this desire, and this is the mostindelible quality in the human heart (L470/S707).

The most indelible quality in the human heart is the desire to enjoy thegood opinion of his fellows. Yet this desire does not call forth virtuousprojects of self-improvement, in which we seek to become ever more worthyof the esteem of others. Far from it. The desire for esteem is essentiallyduplicitous. In a slogan: the desire for esteem creates the desire to seem.

It is easy to miss the full force of Pascals critique. He does not claim merely

that the desire for esteem is one activity among others, activities performedby an otherwise substantial self. Rather, the relentless activity by which wepursue the esteem of others just is the moi, the false self identified by thefragments discussed above (L688/S567, L806/S653) and, furthermore, themoi just is the selfor at least the only self to which we have any epistemicaccess. Thus, for Pascal, the self is essentially duplicitous. Betterit is essen-tially an act of duplicity, duplicity in act.

Elsewhere in the Penses, Pascal presents and develops this claim. In a longand polished fragment entitled self-love (amour-propre), he argues that our

subjectivity depends on social relationships, which themselves depend onjoint projects of deception, pretense, and hypocrisy (L978/S743). The dialec-tic is complex. A persons amour-propre causes him to deceive both himselfand others, but it also causes him to pretend to believe those trying to deceivehim. Pascal intends this complex dialectic as an account of subjectivity as

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such. Indeed, the fragments opening line asserts an equivalence betweenselfhood and self-love: The nature of amour-propre and of this human selfis to love only self and consider only self (La nature de lamour-propre et de ce

moi humain est de n aimer que soi et de ne considerer que soi. [L978/S743]).

The nature of amour-propre and of this human self is to love only self andconsider only self. But what is it to do? It cannot prevent the object of itslove from being full of faults and wretchedness: it wants to be great andsees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; itwants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to bethe object of mens love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve onlytheir dislike and contempt. The predicament in which it thus finds itself

arouses in it the most unjust and criminal passion that could possibly beimagined, for it conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukesit and convinces it of its faults. It would like to do away with this truth,and not being able to destroy it as such, it destroys it, as best it can, in theconsciousness of itself and others and it cannot bear to have thempointed out or noticed.

It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil tobe full of them and unwilling to recognize them since this entails thefurther evil of deliberate self-delusion [illusion volontaire]. We do not want

others to deceive us; we do not think it is right for them to want us toesteem them more than they deserve; it is therefore not right either thatwe should deceive them and want them to esteem us more than wedeserve . . . (L978/S743)

The link between selfhood and self-love asserted in the fragments openingline follows from Pascals claim that love calls the self into being (L688/S653).It quickly becomes apparent that any self called into being by self-love must beessentially duplicitous. Accordingly, in the fragments opening salvo, Pascal

opposes self-lucidity to the desire for the love and esteem of other people. Theself not only wants esteem of others, it also wants to deserve it. But it also seesthat it is wretched, small, and imperfect. Pascal writes that the self wants to bethe object of mens love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only theirdislike and contempt. Since it cannot (we may suppose) successfully attack itsown imperfections, it attacks the awareness of its imperfections, both in itsown consciousness and in the consciousness of others. The self conceives adeadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and it would like to do awaywith this truth but it cannot. Instead, it destroys the truth in the conscious-

ness of itself and othersnot completely, however, but only as best it can.It is clear that Pascal is describing a complex process of outwardly-directedpretense and inwardly directed self-deception. Yet, recalling the fragmentsfirst line, we must understand this process as an account of the self as such:selfhood as duplicity in act, once again.




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As the fragment proceeds, Pascal complicates his claim that we deceiveothers to earn their esteem. Although we do act deceivingly toward others, itturns out that they are not innocent victims and, in this fragment, they are not

really even deceived. Rather, they see through our deceptions and deceive usin turn. What Pascal first calls deception is actually more like collusion inhypocrisy, since both sides pretend to accept the false appearances presentedby the other.

This aversion for the truth exists in differing degrees, but it is in everyoneto some degree because it is inseparable from self-love. It is this falsedelicacy which makes those who have to correct others choose so manydevious ways and qualifications of giving offense. They must minimize

our faults, pretend to excuse them, and combine this with praise andmarks of affection and esteem. Even then such medicine still tastes betterto amour-propre. . . .

The result is that anyone who has an interest in winning our affectionavoids rendering us a service which he knows to be unwelcome; we aretreated as we want to be treated; we hate the truth and it is kept from us;we desire to be flattered and we are flattered; we like being deceived andwe are deceived. . . .

Thus, human life is nothing but a perpetual illusion; there is nothing but

mutual deception and flattery. No one talks about us in our presence ashe would in our absence. Human relations are only based on this mutualdeception; and few friendships would survive if everyone knew what hisfriend said about him behind his back, even though he spoke sincerelyand dispassionately. . . . (L978/S743; see also L792/S646).

There is a shift in perspective in this passage. It is no longer just we whodeceive others; those same others also deceive us. They pretend to excuseour faults, and pursue many devious ways and qualifications to avoid

offending us. Of course, we are meant to understand that each person con-tinually plays both the role of flatterer and flattered in this scenario, sincehuman relations are only based on this mutual deception.

Pascals claim that everyone deceptively flatters other people is actuallysomewhat unexpected. After all, the aversion for the truth and the falsedelicacy that Pascal criticizes are qualities that spring from disordered loveofselfand yet they cause us to flatter the self-image ofothers. We might expecthim to say the opposite, since he holds that everyone wants to dominateeveryone else (L597/S494). After all, if a person wishes to be great, it would

make sense for him to denigrate others, not flatter them, so that he himselfwould seem great by comparison. Pascals insight to the contrary exposesthe real dynamics of self-love. Universal self-love has the unintended conse-quence of creating universal flattery. My own purely selfish goal gives me amotive to advance your equally selfish goal.

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As fragment L978/S743 draws to a close, Pascal returns to the idea that thesource of this mutual deception lies in the human subject as such:

Man is nothing therefore but disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in

himself and with regard to others. He does not want to be told the truth.He avoids telling it to others, and all these tendencies, so remote fromjustice and reason, are naturally rooted in his heart (L978/S743).

This final move is significant because it emphasizes that, according to Pascal,the mutual deception that characterizes all social relationships is not just aculturally contingent feature of his own (admittedly duplicitous) society.Mutual deception is a precondition of any human relationship because it isnaturally rooted in the heart, the seat of love and subjectivity. The human

being as such just is disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself andwith regard to others (Lhomme nest donc que dguisement, que mensonge ethypocrisie, et en soi-mme et lgard des autres).

By reading the fragments on the desire for esteem alongside the fragmentson the moi and on self-love, it is clear that, for Pascal, the self just is the moi,the imaginary, socially-constructed self formed by dynamic interaction withother people. This imaginary self is the only proper object of a most improperself-love. Pascals logic is brutal: to be a self is to be an object of love (L688/S567), but the self, considered in itself, is full of faults and wretchedness,

and possesses no qualities that can compel real love (L978/S743). It followsthat to be a self at all is to be an imaginary self that compels only duplicitouslove (L806/S653). In all of these fragments, the self is de-centered: it is notfound in Cartesian self-presence but in the imaginations of other people. It istrue that Pascal writes elsewhere that my self [significantly, le moi] consistsin my thought (L135/S167), but fragment L806/S653 shows us how tointerpret this statement. My self may consist in my thought, but my thoughtconsists in thinking about myself in the thoughts of another.12 My self isthus doubly imaginary. It is my own imaginary projection of how I exist in

the thoughts and imaginations of other people.13

Although he himself doesnt quite put it this way, according to Pascal, ourselfhood is a fantasy. The moi is the only self to which we have access, and itis inherently false and duplicitous. According to Pascal, the selves that wemanifest to the world are only polite fictions that conceal our libido dominandi.To be a self at all is to be a false, imaginary self that exists for the sake ofimagined esteem. The tendency toward duplicity that infects our inter-personal relationships also infects our very subjectivity. We are multiplyoriented away from the truth. We eschew self-knowledge about who we are

and what we do, as we lovingly attend to our imaginary selves and manifestthem to the world.

Pascals claim that to be a self is to be a false, duplicitous self requiresqualification. As a formal matter, the distinction between true and false selvesinevitably collapses if there are no true selves at all. And it is obviously not the




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case, as he would have it, that no one ever has any qualities that genuinelydeserve love or that no one ever loves others because of their genuinelylovable qualities. These claims are best read as the work of a moralist and not

a metaphysician, one who exaggerates for effect in order to reveal deep truthsabout human nature and human relationships. Pascals exaggerated languageadvances the robustly theological claim that only God is worthy of unre-stricted love. On this understanding, the true self is the self that ceases to bea moi precisely insofar as it imitates Christ by loving God above all things.

Parodying God by Performing the False Self

If every self is a false self, a moi, it is equally clear that this condition is no

accident, according to Pascal. We do not just find ourselves trapped by thepatterns of deception and self-deception that create the moi. Instead, as fallensubjects we actively construct our imaginary selves in a joint performance oftacit cooperation with other duplicitous subjects. The duplicitous subject, likea player on the stage, enacts his own false self-understanding and in so doing,reinforces it and maintains it in being. We actively construct our imaginaryselves, we want to become them, and we try to manifest them in the world.We want to inhabit these false selves utterly and so we try to divert our ownattention from the fact that they are false.

As presented so far, this account of the false self, however striking, couldeasily be construed as moralistic, existential, and wholly secular, withoutreference to the divine. Yet the performance of the false self is at root a sinfulperformance. The patterns of deception and self-deception that call the falseself into being are nothing other than a perverse imitation of Gods own goodactivity of creating and sustaining the world. The false self is best understoodas a parodic imitation of God.

The project of enacting the false self certainly displays the performativeincoherence of sin. Pride and the desire for esteem often walk hand-in-hand

and so it is easy to overlook the fact that they are not natural partners at all.Whereas pride seems like a kind of self-assertion, the desire for esteem seemsmore like a form of self-dispersal, a kind of dependence on others. Althoughthe desire for esteem is spawned by an idolatrous love of self, and althoughit may be the most indelible quality of the human heart, (L470/S707) itsurely cannot be the desire of someone who genuinely believes himself to bean autonomous god-man, secure in the knowledge that he is a self-containedlaw unto himself. Rather, the desire for esteem is more like a kind of depen-dence. If all the happiness of men lies in the approval of others (L470/

S707), then surely we each depend on that approval in a very basic way.Everyone pursues an incoherent project of self-glorification through obsequi-ous, self-abnegating dependence.14

This incoherent project is, again, nothing other than the project of publiclyperforming the false self. Yet now it seems that this performance has two

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moments. Interestingly, each moment corresponds to a traditional kind ofsin, pride (self-assertion), on the one hand, and sloth (self-dispersal), on theother.15 In the moment of self-assertion, the duplicitous subject rejects the

world as it is and cognitively tries to remake it in some favored image. Inmore conventional terms: because he finds the truth about himself and hisprojects threatening, he rejects it in favor of a falsehood. This can be under-stood as a kind of prideful self-assertion, willfully imposing ones owndesired interpretation on the world. In the moment of self-dispersal, on theother hand, the duplicitous subject consents to the deceptive order of theworld by agreeing to play a character in a social drama that aims at hidingthe truth about himself and others. He conspires with other people to con-struct and inhabit an imaginary world that is designed to enable everyone

to preserve their false self-understandings.I choose the words consent, conspire, and enable, with care, in orderto signal that the agency involved in constructing the false self is peculiar. Itis both active and passive at the same time. Self-assertion describes the waythe duplicitous subject constructs his false interpretations in the first place. Inthe moment of self-assertion, the duplicitous subject recognizes and rejectsthe truth about himself, and so he is not merely ignorant, mistaken, or avictim of the deception of others. Yet the duplicitous subject can successfullyconstruct and inhabit an imaginary self only because his fellow human beings

are themselves also deceivers and self-deceivers. All sides work together tofacilitate mutual duplicity. The social mechanisms of self-dispersal thereforeenable the duplicitous subject to preserve his false self-understanding.Without them, he could not divert his attention from unwelcome truthsabout himself; nor could he continue believing the more welcome falsehoods.This dual structure reveals the deepest, most incoherent structure of sinfulsubjectivity. Whereas we should passively accept the truth wherever weencounter it, we instead actively impose our own false interpretations on theworld (self-assertion). And whereas we should actively resist the worlds

corrupt blandishments and try to develop a coherent and virtuous self, weinstead passively consent to the duplicitous, imaginary self suggested by theworld (self-dispersal).

Thus, in the full light of a robust theology of sin, the false self appears asnot just logically incoherent but morally dreadful. The false self is nothing butthe product of an attempt, ever frustrated, to imitate the Creator. When theduplicitous subject turns away from God in his duplicity, he mocks andparodies Gods own good activity. God loves and creates the worldthatwhich is not Godand thereby holds it in being; creation is good because

God makes it so. The duplicitous subject loves not God, nor the world as it is,nor even himself as he is. Instead, he loves a constructed, imaginary self,which can flourish only in an imaginary world of his own devising. That iswhat he lovingly creates and holds in being; he tries to make it good but hecannot. With this incoherent activity, he inverts the dialectic of presence and




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absence that characterizes Gods agency in the world. On Pascals under-standing, Gods kenotic absence from the world allows the world to exist,and is therefore more real than the presence of anything that is not God (see

fragment L449/S690). On the other hand, the duplicitous subjects mode ofbeing in the world is thoroughly false: insofar as he is a moi, a false self, he ispresent in the world at all only to the degree that he is not real, only to thedegree that he withdraws from the real world and into an imaginary world ofhis own contrivance.16 Whereas Pascals God hides from the world becausethe world cannot bear Gods goodness, the duplicitous subject hides from theworld because the world cannot bear his own sinfulness. It may seem strangeto say that a thoroughly fallen world cannot bear the presence of sin. Yet evenin a fallen world, we are not like Miltons Satan. Evil be thou my good is not

the cry of an intelligible human agent. Even in a fallen world, sin must appearin the guise of the good, which is why duplicity is its ever-present henchman.This, then, is Pascals first account of human subjectivity.

The True Self and Trinitarian Subjectivity

Pascals account of duplicitous subjectivity is theologically fruitful, but itleaves some important questions unanswered. His first account of subjectiv-ity asserts that we are false, imaginary selves because we are called into being

by socially-reinforced, idolatrous self-love. As a sheer matter of logic,however, any conception of a false self must depend on some prior concep-tion of a true self, the norm from which one deviates. Yet finding any con-ception of genuine or authentic selfhood in the Penses requires considerableinterpretive work. In my view, Pascal does present the outline of such anaccount in the set of fragments on the body of thinking members (L360-374/S392-405).17

The basic insight that underpins Pascals account of the true self is notsurprising. Given that to be a self is to be an object of love, it follows that a

true self can only be called into being by a true, because rightly-ordered, love.To say that our loves are rightly-ordered is to say that we love God above allthings, and love everything else, including the self, through God and for God.This is a standard Christian claim, of course, but Pascal develops it in anespecially interesting way, in a series of fragments on what it means to be amember of the body of Christ. Once again, the theme of imitation is central.Just as a false self, a moi, parodically imitates God, so also a true self imitatesChrist, who loves God above all things; by imitating Christ, the true selfvirtuously imitates God.

In the fragments on the body of thinking members Pascal shows that whenthe self attains genuine self-knowledge, it will not only love itself differentlybut will in fact become a different kind of self altogether. As discussed above,Pascal believes that sinful, duplicitous subjects inevitably try to make them-selves the center of everything and tyrannize everyone else (L597/S494). As

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a way of resisting our innate self-love, he therefore suggests a thought-experiment. If we imagine that we are each parts of a greater whole, a bodyof thinking members, we will subordinate our own value to the value of the

whole and thereby love ourselves properly. In order to control the love weowe to ourselves, we must imagine a body full of thinking members (for weare members of the whole), and see how each member ought to love itself,etc. (L368/S401).

To be a member is to have no life, no being, and no movement exceptthrough the spirit of the body and for the body. The separated member,no longer seeing the body to which it belongs, has only a wasted andmoribund being left. However, it believes itself to be whole, and, seeingno body on which it depends, it believes itself to be dependent only onitself and tries to make itself its own center and body. But not having initself any principle of life, it only wanders about and becomes bewilderedat the uncertainty of its existence, quite conscious that it is not the bodyand yet not seeing that it is a member of a body. Eventually, when itcomes to know itself, it has returned home, as it were, and only lovesitself for the bodys sake. . . . (L372/S404).

It is clear that the fragments on the body of thinking members are inspired byPauls discussion of the body of Christ in 1 Cor. 12. There are also further

allusions in this fragment to the Biblical story of the prodigal son: the sepa-rated member wanders about and becomes bewildered at the uncertaintyof existence until it comes to know itself and returns home. On myreading, these Biblical tropes also work to emphasize the conceptual relationsthat bind the selfs being, its self-knowledge, and its self-love.

Pascal begins with ontology. Separated from the body, the self has onlywasted and moribund being left, yet Pascal treats this ontological separa-tion as a failure of self-knowledge: the selfs being is moribund just becauseit no longer sees the body to which it belongs and falsely believes itself to be

whole. Furthermore, when the self overcomes this failure of self-knowledge,and comes to know itself truly, its self-love is immediately transformed. Oncethe self no longer falsely believes itself to be whole, it comes to know itself,and then it loves itself for the bodys sake. To unpack Pascals metaphor,when the self knows itself rightly, it also loves itself rightly, andcirclingback to ontologyit thereby becomes a different kind of self altogether:whole but not alone, no longer isolated but a member of the body.

Enlightenment modernity is accustomed to treating being, love, andknowledge as sharply distinct, but for Pascal, it is not possible to separate

them when it comes to discussions of the self.18 For example, in anotherfragment he writes:

. . . If the foot had never known it belonged to the body, and that therewas a body on which it depended, if it had only known and loved itself,




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and if it then came to know that it belonged to a body on which itdepended, what regret, what shame it would feel for its past life. . . . Howsubmissively it would let itself be governed by the will in charge of the

body . . . (L373/5405).

Pascal seems to assume that the foot would automatically love itself properlyand submit its will to the will of the body when it comes to know itself. Hedoes not leave any room for a foot that knows that it belongs to the body andyet refuses to love the body as the source of its own being. The next fragmentexplains why there is no such room. There is no such room because the veryidea of rejecting the general source of happiness in the name of privatehappiness is incoherent:

If the feet and hands had their own wills, they would never be properlyin order except when submitting this individual will to the primal willgoverning the whole body. Otherwise they would be disorganized andunhappy, but in desiring only the good of the body they achieve theirown good (L374/406).

In the idiom of these fragments, it would be incoherent for the hands andthe feet to come to know that their happiness is a function of the good of

the body without thereby also loving the good of the body. Because it wouldbe incoherent, it seems natural to say that if they do not, in fact, love the goodof the body, then the hands and feet do not really believe that their happinessis a function of the good of the body. It is in this sense that genuine self-loveand genuine self-knowledge are inseparable. A change in self-knowledgeentails a change in self-love, and surely these two changes together entaila change in the kind of self that one is. A self that loves itself above all andregards itself as an isolated, wholly autonomous source of value is simplynot the same kind of thing as a self that subordinates its own good to the

universal good of all.In Pascals terms, a self that subordinates its own private good to the

universal good has ceased to be a moi. Pascal himself gave the title Christianmorality to the bundle of fragments on the body of thinking members. Thelesson is clear: a genuine change in self-knowledge and self-love could not bemerely an internal, inwardly directed affair. As selves in a world, we neces-sarily project our self-understandingsboth true and falseinto the world.When we attain real self-knowledge, we not only love ourselves with a rightlyordered love; we also engage differently with the world. Our tyrannical

self-love is transformed (through the help of Gods grace) into an impartiallove that desires the good of all. And if the member truly desires the good ofall, then surely its actions must express this desire. In other words, undersin or under grace, our self-knowledge and self-love are always sociallyexpressed and, again, performative. We perform our selves, according to

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Pascal, and so it follows that the project of performing agapic love willnecessarily shape one into a different kind of self, something other than aselfish, tyrannical moi.

Another interpretative difficulty looms, however. Once the self has ceasedto be a moi, what else is left for it to be? Recall that elsewhere in the PensesPascal claims that a true self is a self that is worthy of love (L688/S567).Perhaps unsurprisingly, he also claims that only God is finally worthy of love.

The true and only virtue is therefore to hate ourselves . . . , and to seek fora being really worthy of love in order to love him. But as we cannot lovewhat is outside us, we must love a being who is within us but is not ourown self. . . . Now only the universal being is of this kind: the kingdom ofGod is within us, universal good is within us, and is both ourselves and

not ourselves (L564/S47 1).

It appears that we are left with two alternatives: either there are no trueselves, because there are no selves worthy of love, or a true self must, in somesense, be identified with God. Pascal chooses both alternatives at once. To theextent that every self is an imaginary self, a moi, there really are no true selves;but to the extent that one ceases to be a moi, one thereby becomes somethingwholly different just insofar as ones self-knowledge and self-love have beentransformed. At the root of our subjectivity we find a self that is both a

worthy and a possible object of love. This self is both ourselves and notourselves. Elsewhere he says that Happiness is neither outside nor insideus: it is in God, both outside and inside us (L407/S26).

We cannot truly love ourselves unless we know and love God, a projectwhich somehow entails that we are also identified with God. Yet according toPascal, we cannot come to know and love God without first knowing andloving Christ: Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but weonly know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and deaththrough Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we cannot know the meaning

of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves (L417/S36). Surely Christ isalso the self that is both ourselves and not ourselves mentioned in L564/S471. The Pascalian true self is the self that is utterly conformed to Christ, withproperly ordered loves. One becomes a true self when one is conformed toGod through the imitation of Christ; one becomes worthy of love by virtueof being so conformed. Thus, on my reading, Pascal holds that the true selfis the self that knows and loves God by imitating Christs own virtuous lovefor God. Christ is the only perfect human subject because his natural humanself-love is also fully identical to love for God. Only when we imitate Christ

can we love God above all things and thereby become true selves.In the fragments on the body of thinking members, Pascal takes the idea

that Christ is the object and center of all things and applies it to the task ofattaining true subjectivity. I argued above that the sinful, false self is bestunderstood as a parodic imitation of God. Yet the converse also holds. To be




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free from duplicity, we must imitate God rightly, by imitating Christ, whois the God-man and the paradigmatic human being. This is what authenticsubjectivity is for Pascal: subjectivity without duplicity, selfhood that is called

into being by a love that is properly ordered towards God. For Pascal, truesubjectivity is Christocentric subjectivity.

It could not by nature love anything else except for selfish reasons and inorder to enslave it, because each thing loves itself more than anything else.

But in loving the body it loves itself, because it has no being except in thebody, through the body, and for the body. He who adheres to God is onespirit [1 Cor. 6:17].

The body loves the hand and if it had a will the hand ought to love itself inthe same way as the soul loves it; any love that goes beyond that is wrong.

Adhering to God in one spirit, we love ourselves because we are membersof Christ. We love Christ because he is the body of which we aremembers. All are one. One is in the other like the three persons [of thetrinity] (L372/S404).19

The body of thinking members is not just any human collective. Pascalsclaim is not merely that selfish individuals should subordinate their private

desires to the good of the whole. The body of thinking members is the bodyofChrist. To recognize that one is a member of the body of Christ is to ceaseto be a false self, a moi, and to become something altogether new. After all, itis constitutive of the moi that it cannot recognize that it is a member of thebody. Once it does recognize that it is a member of the body, it immediatelyceases to be a moi. Having ceased to be a moi, the only thing left for it to be isa member of the body of Christ, the one who loves God above all things. Andsurely to be a member of the body of Christ is also to imitate Christ andthereby become Christ-like.

Indeed, it is striking that the selfs transformation is described in explicitlyTrinitarian terms. In the fragment above, Pascals model for authentic self-love, and therefore authentic subjectivity, is nothing other than perichoresis,the perfect, self-giving love of the Father, Son, and Spirit: we love ourselvesbecause we are members of Christ. We love Christ because he is the body ofwhich we are members. All are one. One is in the other like the three persons[of the trinity] (L372/S404). Indeed, this fragment goes so far as to equatesubjectivity with theosis: by adhering to Christ in the mystical body webecome one spirit with God, and this is just what it means to be a genuine

self. Theosis is the goal of authentic selfhood. We are true selveswe are trulyselveswhen we are a part of Christ, in the mystical body, constitutivelyjoined with God and neighbor by mutual, self-giving love, just as Christ isconstitutively joined with the Father and Spirit in the perichoretic union ofthe holy trinity.

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Conclusion

Pascals account of sinful subjectivity presents selfhood as duplicity: underthe conditions of the fall, we are false, imaginary selves called into being by

improper self-love, performing our subjectivity in a dark parody of divinegoodness. Conversely, we slough off the false self and attain genuine subjec-tivity when (by grace, Pascal would surely say) we truly imitate God andconform ourselves to Christ, who loves God above all things. Scholars rarelyexplore the theological depths of Pascals thoughts about duplicitous subjec-tivity. They discuss the fragments on the body of thinking members evenmore rarely.20 This omission is especially regrettable, because these fragmentsare a necessary complement to Pascals account of sinful subjectivity. More-over, when one overlooks the fragments on the body of thinking members,

one can easily overlook Pascals role in the history of modern theologicalthought about the self.

If my reading is correct, in these fragments it is Pascal who launcheshowever inchoatelya tradition of Trinitarian retrieval that is of the greatestcontemporary interest. This tradition holds that the modern individualisticsubject is a pernicious illusion and that true subjectivity is relational andtrinitarian.21 This tradition of inquiry looks back to the premodern, to be sure,but insofar as it is also explicitly counter-modern, it necessarily occurs withinand after modernity. Pascal, writing at the very dawn of modernity, can fairly

claim to be its originator. As David Tracy asks: At the very end of earlymodernity and with Enlightenment modernity on its way, who else [butPascal] saw so clearly the possibilities and devastating limits of modernity?22

Pascals Penses present us with, on the one hand, a rich portrait of sinfulhuman subjectivity and, on the other hand, a picture of authentic subjectivitythat anticipates the work of contemporary Trinitarian theorists of the selfby some three hundred years. Who else indeed?23

NOTES

1 This picture is certainly a stereotype. Specialists do not find it in the work of Descarteshimself. Nevertheless, even if Descartes is no Cartesian, there is no doubt that the Cartesiansubject has had a life of its own in modern thought and has recently been an object ofvirulent theological criticism. For a more nuanced account of Descartes and for an entry-point into the specialist literature on him see Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought:The Age of Suspicion (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 3, Descartesforma futuri, pp. 5099.

2 I cite the Pensesby fragment number from Krailsheimers translation (Blaise Pascal, Penses.Trans. A. J. Krailsheimer [New York, NY: Penguin, 1966]), which uses the Lafuma number-ing scheme. In addition to the Lafuma number (L), I also cite each fragment by Sellier

number (S), which is used in both Roger Ariews translation (Penses. Trans. Roger Ariew.Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2005) and in Honor Levi, ed., Penses andOther Writings (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995).

3 See, e.g., Jean Mesnard, Les Penses de Pascal, third edition, (Paris: Socit dditiondnseignement suprieur, 1993), pp. 178210; Hugh M. Davidson, Blaise Pascal (Boston,MA: Twaine, 1983), pp. 7879.




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4 See Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes Metaphysical Prism, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky, (Chicago, IL:University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 277345. According to Marion, Pascal identifiesCartesian thought with the second of his well-known three orders (body, mind, andcharity, from fragment L308/S339) and tries, in various ways, to show that the third-order

(the order of love and grace) transcends the second. See also Vincent Carraud, Pascal et laphilosophie (Paris: PUF, 1992), esp. chaps. 34, pp. 217345. In general, the current scholarlyconsensus holds that Pascal was not only well-acquainted with, but even sympathetic to,Descartes philosophy. At the same time, the consensus also holds that in the Penses, Pascaltried to subvert elements of that philosophy by showing its limitations. See, for example,Henri Gouhier, Blaise Pascal: Conversion et apologtique (Paris: Vrin, 1986), pp.108193; MichelLe Guern, Pascal et Descartes (Paris: Nizet, 1971).

5 See Vincent Carraud, Remarks on the Second Pascalian Anthropology: Thought as Alien-ation, Journal of Religion Vol. 85 (2005), pp. 539554. Carraud distinguishes between atheological anthropology found in the fragments on greatness and wretchedness and aphenomenological and philosophical anthropology that concerns the discourse of humanexistence and is found in the fragments on glory, the imagination, justice, and diversion

(p. 545). According to Carraud, this second anthropology is not ruled by any theologicalprinciple (p. 546). Carrauds readings of particular fragments are often quite insightful butthe strict separation he finds between the philosophical/ existential, on the one hand, andthe theological, on the other, is his own. It is not Pascals.

6 A bit more ground-clearing is in order here. The Penses is a fragmentary text and so strictlyspeaking, it is not quite accurate to say that it contains Pascals account of anythingwhatsoever, on the ordinary understanding of that term. It follows thatto a greater degreethan with other textsany interpretation of the Penses must be partial and tentative.Despite their fragmentary character, however, I believe that we do find an underlyingcoherence to the Penses when we approach it in the right spirit. Hugh Davidson bestarticulates that spirit: we should watch Pascal at work, describe his practice, and see to whatextent his practices can be related to a more general topic of inquiry. When we proceed in

this way, we see not only recurrent problems, but also reappearing lines of attack on them,tendencies that bespeak something conscious and deliberate. Hugh M. Davidson, Pascaland the Arts of the Mind (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. xiii.

7 I straightforwardly follow Marion: To become a self I need to be neither seen, nor thought,nor known, but nothing less than loved. (On Descartes Metaphysical Prism, p. 324).

8 What then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands,affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.Meditation II, in John Cottingham, et. al., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 2(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19841991), p. 19 [AT VII: 28]. For commentary,see Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes Metaphysical Prism, pp. 322333; Vincent Carraud, Pascalet la philosophie, pp. 315326; Paulette Carrive, Lecture dune Pense de Pascal: Quest-ceque le moi? Les etudes philosophiques Vol. 3 (1983), pp. 353356.

9 See note 8, above.10 Cottingham, et. al., The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 2, pp. 2123.11 I return in due course to the point that an imaginary self with imaginary being seems to

presuppose a real self with real being.12 I follow Carraud, Remarks on the Second Pascalian Anthropology: Thought as Alienation,

pp. 552553. Contra Carraud, however, I read this fragment as a key instance of Pascals fullytheological anthropology. To think oneself in the thought of another is itself a form of sinfulpride, in which the self tries to become everything, if not in reality, then in the imaginationsof other people. I discuss this claim further below.

13 It might be more accurate to say ones subjective narrative identity is a single imaginarystory, doubly told, because it is the identity that one imaginatively constructs for oneself asfiltered through ones imaginative reconstructions of the thoughts of others (which are

sometimes based on actual interactions, of course).14 For a good account of how the false self is actually a structural requirement of the disorderedlove that results from the fall, see Christian Lazzeri, Force et justice dans la politique de Pascal(Paris: PUF, 1993), p. 910, 4052.

15 By distinguishing between self-assertion and self-dispersal, I intend to evoke feministtheologies of sin. These theologies argue that such temptations as underdevelopment and

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negation of the self are distinct from the traditional temptations associated with pride.See Valerie Saiving, The Human Situation: A Feminine View, The Journal of Religion Vol. 40(1960), p. 109. Alistair McFadyen presents the following list of verbs as those characteristi-cally associated with the diminution of selfhood: failing, hiding, abdicating, abnegating,

denying, fleeing, participating, being complicit, acquiescing in, accepting, consenting to,complying, and cooperating with. See his, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the ChristianDoctrine of Sin (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 142143. Interest-ingly, as Pascal develops his overall dialectic of greatness and wretchedness, he himselfsometimes says that sin has two roots. In a minor chord that sounds throughout his treat-ment of human nature, pride is only one of those sources. The other source is paresse, aFrench word that translates the Latin acediaspiritual apathy, otherwise known as the sin ofsloth (L774/S638, L208/S240). On the other hand, perhaps it is a mistake to suggest thatthere is a proto-feminist theology of sin buried in the text of the Penses. Philippe Sellier, forexample, claims that Pascals distinction between paresse and pride is only superficial andthat the former clearly reduces to the latter. According to Sellier, paresse is only the worn-out face of pride, a concept that captures the idea that we will ourselves to be exceptional

until we are in despair. See Pascal et Saint Augustin (Paris: Cohn, 1970), pp. 185186. I amconvinced that Selliers interpretation is wrong, but I cannot argue the matter here.16 With this talk of withdrawal, I also mean to echo Augustines privative account of evil.17 Scholars who have discussed the fragments on the body of thinking members typically have

not emphasized that they present Pascals positive account of authentic human subjectivity.Jan Miel, Pascal and Theology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), treatsthe relevant fragments, first, as a metaphor for predestination that shows what it means forthe human will to be moved by the divine will; and, second, as a bridge between Pascalstheology of grace and his notions concerning the Christian in society, p. 178179. JacobMeskin provides the best discussion in English in his Secular Self-Confidence, Postmod-ernism and Beyond: Recovering the Religious Dimension of Pascals Penses, Journal ofReligion Vol. 75 (1995), pp. 487508. Meskin correctly sees that Pascal argues in the relevant

fragments that we must identify with Christ in order to transform our subjectivity. Meskindoes not set this insight in dialectical opposition to Pascals thoughts on the false self (themoi) and sinful subjectivity, however, and he does not remark on the Trinitarian theme offragment L372/S404. Nor does Miel. Without in any way claiming exhaustive knowledge ofthe French scholarship, the treatments I have found do not emphasize the themes I discusshere. Gerard Ferreyrolles reads the fragments on the body of thinking members in social-political terms (Pascal et la raison du politique [Paris: PUP, 1984], pp. 246). Michelle Guern, inhis book on the image in Pascal, recognizes the prominence of the image of the body ofthinking members in Pascals thought, but draws no philosophical or theological conclu-sions about this fact (Limage dans loeuvre de Pascal [Paris: Colin, 1969], p. 146150). PierreMagnard presents a fine, rich discussion but his treatment is also primarily historical andexegetical (Un corps plein de membres pensants, in Dominique Descotes, Antony

McKenna et Laurent Thirouin eds., Le rayonnement de Port-Royal, Mlanges en lhonneur dePhilippe Sellier [Paris, Champion, 2001], pp. 333340. I am not aware that Marion discussesthe relevant fragments at all, though he certainly recognizes that for Pascal, authenticsubjectivity must be centered on Christ, as the universal object of love (See On Descartes

Metaphysical Prism, pp. 329331). Finally, Carraud does discuss the body of thinkingmembers and even recognizes their Trinitarian character, but he reads the fragments inquestion quite differently (see note 20 below).

18 To be sure, we recognize a sense of self-knowledge that is unrelated to the selfs being orits love. That is, there is a sense of self-knowledge in which we could say simply that aperson knows certain facts about himself. But this thin sense of self-knowledge is not thesense that Pascal develops with his image of the body of thinking members.

19 In the original, the internal quotations are in Latin, as Pascal cites from the Vulgate Bible:

Qui adhaeret Deo unus spiritus est and Adhaerens Deo unus spiritus est, respectively.20 See note 17, above. Interestinglythough, I would say, unfortunatelyCarraud reads thefragments on the body of thinking members as anti-Augustinian. According to Carraud,Pascalunlike Augustinedoes not say that all human beings find themselves with twomutually opposing loves (self-love and the love for God). Nor, according to Carraud, doesPascal call for a change in the object of ones love (from the self to God) but rather for a




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change in the nature of ones love: to love oneself justly one must love oneself as one is lovedby God, which presumably means impartially (Pascals Anti-Augustinianism Perspectiveson Science Vol. 15 (2007), p. 461; see also Pascal et la philosophie, p. 341). This claim fits in withCarraud s overall reading (which I share in part) that, for Pascal, to be a self is to think about

oneself in the thought of another. It would follow that the right kind of self is a self thatthinks about itself in the thought of the right kind of OtherGod. Carrauds picture, then,is of a self that changes the way it knows and loves itself but does not change in its being,when it comes to recognize that it is a member of the mystical body. For example, Carraudsays explicitly that for Pascal, unlike for Augustine, self-love does not need to be con-verted but only controlled (Pascals Anti-Augustinianism, p. 461). He thereby impliesthat there is no fundamental change in the self as it exists before and after it comes to see thatit is a member of the body. On my reading, Carraud does not pay enough attention to theChristological and Trinitarian elements of the relevant fragments and so he does not appre-ciate the fact that the self is not only converted but even essentially transformed when itcomes to regard itself as a member of the body.

21 For one example among many, see Catherine Mowry La Cugna, God For Us: The Trinity and

Christian Life, chap. 8, Persons in Communion, (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1991), pp.243317. For adroit resistance to the claim that personhood is relational, see Harriet A.Harris, Should We Say that Personhood is Relational?, Scottish Journal of Theology Vol.51(1998), pp. 214234.

22 David Tracy, Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of Our Times, in John D. Caputo andMichael J. Scanlon, eds. God the Gift and Postmodernism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago,1999), p. 180.

23 Many friends and colleagues have read and commented on various ancestors of this article.I would especially like to thank the most recent set of commentators: Johannes Zachhuber,

Joel Rasmussen, Philip Endean, Timothy Mawson, and the other members of the Universityof Oxford Modern Theology seminar. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees forthis journal.

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