the seventeenth-century moralists and Pascal
4. Descartes and Pascal on the imagination and the love of God
Descartes describes the love of God as “the most delightful and useful passion possible”
(Kenny 1970, 212).19 How is the love of God a passion and what role is played by imagina-tion in this context?
It is generally conceived that the love of God is spiritual and intellectual, which means that God can never be represented truthfully by the faculty of imagination. Descartes defines intellectual love as a movement of the will towards an object from which the soul possesses a complete knowledge. The soul then considers itself and the good as two parts of a single whole.20 The movement of the will towards the clear and distinct ideas, (as it is shown in the Fourth Meditation), could be conceived as the most clear example of an intel-lectual love independent from every influence of the body. From a metaphysical point of view, the soul is conceived according to the primitive notion of ‘mens’.
At the beginning of his letter to Chanut, however, Descartes claims that, with regard to human life (where the soul is conceived in its union with the body), intellectual love and passionate love necessarily co-exist.21 Every human soul is in a close union with his body.
This means that even when love is based on a reasonable judgment, this always engenders the movement of the life spirits in the body.22 So even the noblest intellectual love, the love of God, will necessarily co-exist with a passionate form of love. But of course, the love of God first appears as a purely intellectual love in that a human soul can love God by means of pure thinking. God can then be conceived by means of a pure intellectual reflection.
In order to acquire this intellectual conception of God, the soul needs to consider God in a specific way. More precisely, the soul is required to represent God as an infinite think-ing substance, of which the human soul constitutes a little particular aspect. The joyful contemplation of God’s attributes in which the finite human soul takes part, refers to a relationship of radical disproportion: through the reflection upon God’s infinity, the soul becomes aware of his own finiteness. The awareness of this disproportion gives rise to the
19 AT IV, 608: “J’ose dire au regard de cette vie, c’est la plus ravissante et la plus utile passion que nous puissions avoir; et même qu’elle peut être la plus forte.”
20 Kenny 1970, 208: “The first (intellectual love), in my view, consists simply in the fact that when our soul perceives some present or absent good, which it judges to be fitting for itself, it unites itself to it in volition, that is to say, it considers itself and the good in question as forming two parts of a single whole.” AT, IV, 601: “La première est, ce me semble, autre chose sinon que, lorsque notre âme aperçoit quelque bien, soit présent, soit absent, qu’elle juge lui être convenable, elle se joint à lui de volonté, c’est-à-dire, elle se considère soi-même avec ce bien-là comme un tout dont il est une partie et elle l’autre.”
21 He only mentions two (rare and accidental) exceptions: on the one hand, the soul can experience a pas-sionate love without knowing why he loves this particular object and, on the other hand, the soul can esteem an object to a very high extent while not feeling any corporeal excitement or passion for this object. Cf. AT IV, 603.
22 As Denis Kambouchner puts it: “With regard to this life, the soul never loves alone, but rather loves with the body it is joined to.” Kambouchner 2008, ‘Cartesian subjectivity and love.’ 31.
attitude of humility, since the soul forgoes the ambition to replace God through experienc-ing gratitude for its dependence upon God’s perfection. Moreover, the insight in God’s infinity and one’s own finiteness does not evoke any feelings of powerlessness or anxiety.
On the contrary, the soul experiences an intense and extreme feeling of joy because of the realization of its dependence upon God.
The question remains how these intellectual forms of love and joy turn into passions.
At this point, Descartes will invoke the faculty of imagination. Of course, the imagination will serve to represent God, by reducing God to an object that can be loved by the soul.23 While the reflection upon God’s infinity excludes every influence of the imagination (the risk of idolatry), the soul nonetheless appeals to the imagination in order to represent his union of dependency with God. Indeed, the soul, as being closely united with the body, will spontaneously imagine his disproportionate relation with God. This image of the un-ion between the soul and God in turn gives birth to a mechanical movement in the body from which arises the violent passions of love and joy. The joy that arises from the consid-eration of one’s union with God does not have a pure intellectual character only: the emo-tion tends to prove the presence of the body. The passions, which arise from this image of the union between the soul and God, tend to surpass their natural and biological finality:
they have a pure disinterested nature. In this context, the imagination renders the abstract reflection upon the disproportionate relation between the soul and God more concrete by providing an image of this union. More precisely, it offers a concrete image of the union between the soul and God, as part of an infinite whole.
Strikingly, Pascal also appeals to the imagination, and more precisely to its function of representing a disproportionate relation, in his view, of the love of God. Despite the fact that the image of the union between the human soul and God never gives rise to passions of love and joy for Pascal, the act of imagining the relation of the soul towards God (as a part of a whole) is an important step towards an authentic morality. In the preceding part, we have seen how the interdependency between human love and the imagination expresses a profound pessimism in Pascal’s anthropological thought: human love as sus-tained and reinforced by some images provided by the imagination, necessarily occurs with (self-)deception and an immoral attitude towards the other. Nonetheless, Pascal did write the Pensées from an apologetic point of view; this means that his ultimate aim is to allude to the possibility of escaping one’s misery next to his emphasis on the miserable and the desperate character of the human condition. Pascal honestly believes that this possibility is offered by the Christian religion. Morality only truly becomes possible by considering the values and the truth of Christianity. However, a real conversion towards Christianity cannot be reached by merits alone since God bequeaths his grace arbitrarily to some elected human beings: “man is only a subject full of error, natural and ineffaceable, without grace.
Nothing shows him the truth” (Trotter 1978, 36).24 The question arises then whether the
23 Guenancia 2010, 108: “Dans le cas de l’amour de Dieu, l’imagination ne se fait pas un Dieu à sa mesure pour pouvoir l’aimer, et, du même coup, s’aimer à travers lui.”
24 Laf. 45, S. 83: “L’homme n’est qu’un sujet plein d’erreur naturelle, et ineffaçable sans la grâce. Rien ne lui montre la vérité.”
love of God is necessary to live a good and happy life, given the fact that one is never sure of receiving divine grace. Pascal deals with this question in a variety of different ways. His most famous answer can be found in the fragment Infini Rien, namely in the conclusion of his well known wager. Pascal argues that if one acts according to the rituals and habits of Christianity, one might naturally start believing. In other words, by imitating the acts of a real and converted Christian, one spontaneously will lead a moral and meaningful life.25
Besides the wager-argument, Pascal also deals with this question in another way.
Namely, he compares the human capacity for loving God with the Paulinian image of the body full of thinking members. This image refers to a whole theological tradition in order to reflect upon the body of Christ as the symbol of the Church.26 Pascal, largely inspired by this Paulinian metaphor from 1 Corinthians 12 (Wood 2013, 220), appeals to this im-age in order to explain how one can regulate one’s vicious self-love in order to regain an authentic love for God:
To regulate the love which we owe to ourselves, we must imagine a body full of thinking members, for we are members of the whole, and must see how each member should love itself, etc. (Trotter 1978, 158).27
Pascal then appeals to a specific use of the imagination in order to render the nature of this love more concrete. The imagination no longer refers, in this context, to an overwhelming force that is capable of producing all kinds of (untruthful) images to which the corrupted will consents. When imagination is no longer in such a close relation to self-love, but in relation to the love of God, it fulfills a positive function:28 the imagination can provide metaphors to represent an incomprehensible reality. While, however, the imagination does not picture the essence of God (this would be idolatry), she does seem capable of produc-ing an image in order to present the relationship between the human soul and God. This
25 “Learn of those who have been like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you could be cured. Fol-low the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc.” (Trotter 1978, 86). Laf. 418, S. 233: “(…) apprenez de ceux, etc. qui ont été liés comme vous et qui parient maintenant tout leur bien. Ce sont gens qui savent ce chemin que vous voudriez suivre et guéris d’un mal dont vous voulez guérir; suivez la manière par où ils ont commencé. C’est en faisant tout comme s’ils croyaient, en prenant de l’eau bénite, en faisant dire des messes, etc. Naturellement même cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira. (…) Or quel mal vous arrivera(-t-)il en prenant ce parti? Vous serez fidèle, honnête, humble, reconnaissant, etc.”
26 For a recent study which elaborates the theological background of this image, we refer to the book of Alberto Frigo, L’esprit du corps.
27 Laf. 368, S. 474: “Pour régler l’amour qu’on se doit à soi-même il faut s’imaginer un corps plein de membres pensants, car nous sommes membres du tout, et voir comment chaque membre devrait s’aimer, etc.”
28 Pierre Guenancia, in his work Divertissements pascaliens, explicitly refers to this positive use of imagi-nation. He argues that the imagination fulfills in this context an instrumental role with regard to the intellect by representing the love for God as the relation between a part and a bigger whole (Guenancia 2011, 178).
image is the (spiritual) body full of thinking members. In order to emphasize the distance between ‘meaningless material images’ and this spiritually significant image, Pascal uses the term ‘figure’ rather than ‘image’ (cf. Guenancia 2011, 172).
How can the precise function of this image, le corps des membres pensants, be under-stood? The fragments in the Pensées that deal with this metaphor all relate to the issue of regulating disorderly self-love in order to prepare for the love of God. This means that this image should be conceived of as a thought-experiment (cf. Wood 2016, 219) by means of which we resist our innate self-love and diminish our passions. Pascal argues that self-love only disappears by the ready recognition of one’s dependence upon God, and because of this one is required to appeal to the image of a body on which every human being depends in terms of membership. Self-love precisely consists in the refusal to recognize one’s de-pendence on the body as a whole. Therefore, Pascal refers to the soul possessed by self-love, the hatred self, by invoking the image of a separated member. This is a soul that is driven by self-love and that takes himself to be a center or a whole upon which everything depends:
The separate member, seeing no longer the body to which it belongs, has only a perishing and dying existence. Yet it believes it is a whole, and seeing not the body on which it depends, it believes it depends only on self, and desires to make itself both center and body (Trotter 1979, 161).29
Through the act of imagining of oneself as a member depending on God as a body, one discovers the depraved, unjust and interested character of his self-love. As a consequence, by means of this metaphorical reflection, one starts to hate the interested desires of power and domination that accompany self-love.
The insight that arises from this image of the body full of thinking members thus gives rise to a disposition for authentic and spiritual love. This disposition to love God, however, does not correspond to an active movement of the will, nor to a useful passion as Descartes puts it. Pascal indeed would never speak in terms of an active movement of the will that gives rise to passions of joy and love. On the contrary, for him true love arises from a (pas-sive) disposition that is made possible by the process of destroying our self-love. For Pascal, the love for God only happens through the gift of divine grace. Nonetheless, he refers to a specific use of the imagination in order to prepare the human soul to receive this grace.
The image of the ‘body of thinking members’ is a means to recognize the soul’s depend-ence upon the whole of God. This part-whole metaphor also played an important role in Descartes’ view of the love of God.
29 Laf. 372, S. 483: “Le membre séparé ne voyant plus le corps auquel il appartient n’a plus qu’un être périssant et mourant. Cependant il croit être un tout et ne se voyant point de corps dont il dépende, il croit ne dépendre que de soi et veut se faire centre et corps lui-même.”
Conclusion
Descartes and Pascal entertain a complex view with regard to the relationship between love and the imagination. Not only has it been shown that both thinkers condemn the close collaboration between a passionate form of love and the imagination, but also it has become clear that both thinkers appeal to the imagination through their approaches of a specific kind of love, namely the love of God.
Both Descartes and Pascal warn their readers of the immoral consequences of an unfettered love in close collaboration with the imagination. We have discovered how Descartes warns of the deceptive and misleading force of the imagination when he deals with the passion of love: a soul often represents his beloved object in an imaginary and ideal way. In his letter to Chanut, Descartes explains how an excessive form of love not only evokes error and deception, but can lead also to evil and catastrophe. Strikingly, Pas-cal also alludes to the dangers related to a mutual dependency between human love and imagination. For instance, the hatred self incessantly appeals to the force of imagination in order to over-valorize some (vain) qualities he ascribes to himself. From this follows that Pascal, despite the fact that he approaches both the imagination and the passions from a theological point of view (considering them as symptoms of original sin), seems to adopt Descartes’ viewpoint on the misleading role of imagination with regard to the passion of love.
What is more, both philosophers analyze the specific case of the love of God by ascrib-ing a positive role to the imagination. For Descartes, the imagination fulfills the role of figuring the disproportionate relation between the finite human soul and the God’s infin-ity. This image leaves in turn an impression in the brain that causes a movement of life spirits in the body. This gives rise to the most violent and useful passions a human soul can experience, namely love and joy. Pascal, however, will interpret the positive function of the imagination with regard to the love of God in a different way. He claims that a hu-man being can never reach the love of God by his own efforts: he can only dispose himself towards the gift of divine grace, which is the ultimate condition of an authentic love. This disposition, however, requires a certain use of the imagination: in order to recognize his dependence upon God, the soul needs to imagine himself as a member relating to a body as a whole. The Paulinian ‘metaphor’ of “the body of thinking members” serves therefore a very important moral goal: the soul diminishes all the vicious desires and passions that accompany his self-love and disposes himself to be affected by the love of God.
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