Wrestling with Religion

    The years have taught us, on the rim of the unrailed pit of unknowing, to stare down at purest blank knowing the ledge we stand on is more, as we ourselves are, of that pit, floored with ignorance only, faith and consternation.                                Middle age returns us with a richer despair to that pubescent catastrophe (quaintly nineteenth-century) when our coats of knowing raveled us naked to winds of namelessness-- still without name.

    As if my latest refusal To make sense called the bluff Of an intransigent demiurge, His dada clockwork. Well, My pout is hardly the first And not likely to make Mr. Big Punch skylights in his Platonic cave. Everything’s infinitely more likely To have been some other thing— Like you, who only last week  Were here alive, and here I am Sitting across a blue table From you, and you are again.

Blase Pascal (1623-1662), was a mathematician, physicist, and inventor who, after his conversion to Catholicism, paradoxically professed rational agnosticism and (to him at least) reasonable faith. In his Pensees , he demonstrates with math-like arguments the futility of trying to understand the cosmos: “an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” (199). We hang short-sighted between two abysses, the unfathomably large and the unfathomably small. What can we do then, he asks, “but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end?” (199) It's impossible, Pascal says, to know “a hidden God” (427) immune to philosophical proofs such as argument from natural order. If God exists, He is infinite. Just as the last number of an infinite series cannot be known to be odd or even, so God cannot be known by finite beings. He “is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limi...